Missouri Governor Mike Parson accuses a journalist of hacking into the State Administration’s Department of Education website after reporting security holes on the page that expose thousands of teachers. This was reported by The missouri independent this Thursday (14).
According to the newspaper, the newspaper’s correspondent St. Louis Post-Dispatcher discovered that a bug on the website allows access to the social security numbers of over 100,000 teachers registered on the platform. To view the data available in the source code of the page for any Internet user, he just had to press the F12 key.
But for Parson, it was a little different. During a press conference, the politician accused the journalist of carrying out a “cyber attack” on the state system with the aim of stealing personal data (in fact, there was no access to confidential information). He also said that the “hacker” was acting to embarrass the state.
As a result, the governor decided to report the reporter to the Cole County Attorney’s Office and also asked the Missouri Highway Patrol to investigate. But a lawyer for the newspaper said there was no reason to sue him because he did the right thing by sharing the vulnerability with the authorities.
Failure has existed for years
According to the professor of cybersecurity at the University of Missouri in St. Louis Shaji Khan, the error in question has existed in the educational platform for at least 10 years. According to the expert, he does not understand how the local authorities allowed the problem to exist for so long without any fixes.
Khan said that he sent a letter to the state asking for a full audit to find out if there are similar vulnerabilities in the online services of other administrations. “Local and state governments across the country are still using applications that were developed many years ago and may contain serious security holes,” he explained.
