Brian Krebs reports on a follow-up to the case of Missouri’s Governor Parsons tried to sue a journalist and others who had responsibly disclosed and reported on a data leak by the state.
The data leak first came to public attention in October, 2021 when Josh Renaud reported on the exposure and the steps the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had taken once they became aware of exposed social security numbers. The state’s response was to “shoot the messenger” and demand that the reporter and anyone who assisted him be prosecuted as a “hacker.”
The charges demanded by the governor would have been just totally absurd if it wasn’t for the fact that Missouri law is worded in such a way that a case could be made for charges.
Fast forward to February and the prosecutor announces that no charges will be filed. A sigh of relief was in order but as yours truly noted on Twitter, the law still needs to be changed so that future prosecutions for similar situations are not even possible. Pressing the F12 button to see a public page’s source code is not “hacking” and should not be criminalized at all.
Yesterday, The Post-Dispatch published the 158-page report (PDF) prepared by the Missouri Highway Patrol providing their findings from their investigation into “the hackers.” The TL;DR version: Renaud did nothing wrong and only accessed information that not only was publicly available, but had been exposed for more than a decade by then. As Krebs notes:
DESE’s website was developed and maintained by the Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division (ITSD) — which the governor’s office controls directly.
While the initial misconfiguration was not on Governor Parson’s watch (responsibility for the site had reportedly been shifted to the ITSD in 2009), it seems fair to say that for all the years since his administration was responsible, his office never detected the misconfiguration or corrected it.
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