As authorized hashish has expanded round the US for each leisure and medical use, firms have amassed troves of knowledge about prospects and their transactions. Individuals who have utilized for medical marijuana playing cards have needed to share notably private well being knowledge to qualify. For some sufferers in Ohio who use medical weed, a current knowledge publicity may influence their delicate info.
Safety researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a publicly accessible database in mid-July that appeared to comprise medical data, psychological well being evaluations, doctor reviews, and pictures of IDs like driver’s licenses for folks looking for medical hashish playing cards. The 323GB trove saved near one million data, together with Social Safety numbers, electronic mail addresses, bodily addresses, dates of start, and medical knowledge—all organized by title.
Primarily based on info that appeared to explain particular staff and enterprise companions, Fowler suspected that the info belonged to the Ohio-based firm Ohio Medical Alliance LLC, which matches by the title Ohio Marijuana Card. Fowler contacted the corporate on July 14; when he checked the database the subsequent day, it had been secured and was not publicly accessible on-line. Fowler didn’t obtain a response about his submission.
Ohio Medical Alliance didn’t reply WIRED’s questions on Fowler’s findings. At one level, although, the corporate’s president, Cassandra Brooks, wrote in an electronic mail: “I would like time to analyze this alleged incident. We take knowledge safety very critically and are trying into this matter.”
“There have been physicians’ reviews that might say what the underlying downside was—whether or not it was nervousness, most cancers, HIV, or one thing else. In some instances, the candidates would submit their very own medical data as proof” of their qualifying situation, Fowler tells WIRED. “I noticed identification paperwork from numerous states, from all over the place. And I even noticed offender launch playing cards, that are principally IDs for individuals who simply received out of jail that they submitted as proof of id to get a medical marijuana card.”
Fowler says that many of the information within the database have been picture codecs like PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. One CSV plaintext doc referred to as “workers feedback” gave the impression to be an export of inner communications, appointment histories, notes about shoppers, and software standing. That file additionally contained extra then 200,000 electronic mail addresses of Ohio Medical Alliance staff, enterprise associates, and prospects.
Databases which might be misconfigured and have inadvertently been left publicly uncovered on the open web are a frequent downside on-line regardless of efforts to lift consciousness concerning the mistake and its privateness implications.
