After discovering that OkHello video chat service’s database was still leaking – nine days after Chris Vickery and I first notified them and tried to get them to secure it – I sent two more emails to OkHello last night to repeat the notification. Both were to email addresses that were only found last night (and great thanks to Steve Ragan…
Category: Of Note
Number of leaking MongoDB databases increasing: Shodan founder
Yesterday’s news about a MongoDB database belonging to MacKeeper (Kromtech) leaking certainly got a lot of media attention. But now do read John Matherly’s comments on Shodan. Matherly, the founder of Shodan, notes that the number of available, unauthenticated instances of MongoDB has actually increased in the past few months. Of note, he explains that increase is occurring…
University of Washington Medicine Pays $750,000 to Settle HHS Charges Relating to Organization-Wide Risk Assessment
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this press release announcing that U. of Washington Medicine has settled charges it potentially violated HIPAA’s Security Rule. The investigation stemmed from an incident reported on this site in November, 2013. The University of Washington Medicine (UWM) has agreed to settle charges that it potentially violated the…
Two apps with health info found leaking: researcher. Part 2: Hzone
This is Part 2 of today’s posts reporting on apps leaking health information. The leaks were shared with DataBreaches.net by researcher Chris Vickery, and this one involves very sensitive health and medical information. Part 1 reported on iFit’s data leak. Screenshots provided to DataBreaches.net on December 8 by Vickery revealed that 4,926 user accounts from Hzone Dating App for HIV-positive…
Personal and sensitive data of 59,000 charter school students in California leaked: researcher
California Virtual Academies (CAVA) is a network of 11 publicly funded charter k-12 schools in California. Researcher Chris Vickery recently contacted DataBreaches.net after he found a database with 58,694 of their students’ records leaking. In addition to a lot of personal information on the students that was all in plain text, the leaking data included some information on student…
Small-Scale Violations of Medical Privacy Often Cause the Most Harm
Note: the following article was reported by Charles Ornstein of ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2015, 5 a.m. and is reproduced under Creative Commons license. Although Ornstein did not mention it in his reporting, the case of Tami Matteson was previously covered on this site in 2013 in a post entitled ” ‘Small’ breach, big harm.” In that article,…