Police injury reports, drug tests, detailed doctor visit notes, social security numbers—all were inexplicably unveiled on a public subdomain ofAmazon Web Services. Welcome to the next big data breach horrorshow. Instead of hackers, it’s old-fashioned neglect that exposed your most sensitive information.
Texas tech enthusiast Chris Vickery had heard strange data dumps could turn up on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, so he started combing through. In early September, he found an enormous data breach that left the private medical information of millions of Americans sitting in the open online.
“It just kind of fell into my lap,” he told Gizmodo.
After Vickery downloaded the data and realized what it was, he started contacting the organizations impacted. Among those exposed: Kansas’ State Self Insurance Fund, CSAC Excess Insurance Authority, and the Salt Lake County Database.