Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Thursday accused a newspaper reporter who discovered a data exposure on a state agency’s website with “hacking” sensitive data. The governor then threatened the reporter and his colleagues with criminal and civil prosecution, despite the fact that the reporter appeared to follow the rules of ethical vulnerability disclosure. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this week that a website maintained by the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, or DESE, inadvertently exposed the personal information of public-school employees across Missouri, including teachers, administrators and guidance counselors. The reporter, who is also a web developer at the paper, discovered that the site’s search tool for educators’ professional credentials was making more than 100,000 Social Security numbers accessible. While the search tool did not display the sensitive data on published web pages, the reporter found that the tool’s HTML source code — a document readily accessible from … Continue reading Missouri governor accuses newspaper of ‘hacking’ state website