As authorized hashish has expanded round america for each leisure and medical use, firms have amassed troves of knowledge about clients and their transactions. Individuals who have utilized for medical marijuana playing cards have needed to share significantly private well being knowledge to qualify. For some sufferers in Ohio who use medical weed, a latest knowledge publicity might affect their delicate data.
Safety researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a publicly accessible database in mid-July that appeared to include medical information, psychological well being evaluations, doctor reviews, and pictures of IDs like driver’s licenses for individuals in search of medical hashish playing cards. The 323-GB trove saved near 1,000,000 information, together with Social Safety numbers, e-mail addresses, bodily addresses, dates of delivery, and medical knowledge—all organized by title.
Based mostly on data 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 e-mail: “I would like time to research this alleged incident. We take knowledge safety very significantly 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 circumstances, the candidates would submit their very own medical information as proof” of their qualifying situation, Fowler tells WIRED. “I noticed identification paperwork from plenty of states, from in every single place. And I even noticed offender launch playing cards, that are principally IDs for individuals who simply obtained out of jail that they submitted as proof of identification to get a medical marijuana card.”
Fowler says that a lot of the recordsdata within the database have been picture codecs like PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. One CSV plaintext doc known as “employees feedback” seemed to be an export of inside communications, appointment histories, notes about shoppers, and utility standing. That file additionally contained extra then 200,000 e-mail addresses of Ohio Medical Alliance staff, enterprise associates, and clients.
Databases which are misconfigured and have inadvertently been left publicly uncovered on the open web are a standard downside on-line despite efforts to boost consciousness concerning the mistake and its privateness implications.
