As authorized hashish has expanded round the USA 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 notably private well being knowledge to qualify. For some sufferers in Ohio who use medical weed, a current knowledge publicity may affect their delicate info.
Safety researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a publicly accessible database in mid-July that appeared to include medical data, psychological well being evaluations, doctor stories, and pictures of IDs like driver’s licenses for individuals looking for medical hashish playing cards. The 323-GB trove saved near 1,000,000 data, together with Social Safety numbers, e-mail addresses, bodily addresses, dates of delivery, and medical knowledge—all organized by identify.
Based mostly 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 fits by the identify Ohio Marijuana Card. Fowler contacted the corporate on July 14; when he checked the database the following 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 want time to analyze this alleged incident. We take knowledge safety very significantly and are trying into this matter.”
“There have been physicians’ stories that may say what the underlying drawback 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 a number of states, from all over the place. And I even noticed offender launch playing cards, that are principally IDs for individuals who simply bought 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 had been picture codecs like PDFs, JPGs, and PNGs. One CSV plaintext doc known as “employees feedback” seemed to be an export of inner communications, appointment histories, notes about purchasers, and software standing. That file additionally contained extra then 200,000 e-mail addresses of Ohio Medical Alliance staff, enterprise associates, and clients.
Databases which can be misconfigured and have inadvertently been left publicly uncovered on the open web are a frequent drawback on-line regardless of efforts to boost consciousness in regards to the mistake and its privateness implications.
