Laura Hautala reports:
It’s some of the most sensitive medical information a person could have. Records for potentially thousands of patients seeking treatment at several addiction rehabilitation centers were exposed in an unsecured online database, an independent researcher revealed Friday [link corrected by DataBreaches.net].
The records included patients’ names, as well as details of the treatment they received, Justin Paine, the researcher, says. Each patient had multiple records in the database, and Paine estimates there could be about 145,000 patients total in the database.
Paine notified the main treatment center, as well as the website hosting company, when he discovered the database. The data has since been made unavailable to the public. Paine found the data by typing keywords into the Shodan search engine that indexes servers and other devices that connect to the internet.
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