Since, the cloud database of the Freedom Healthcare Staffing located in Aurora, Colo was left with no password protection; personal info of healthcare workers and staff nurses were left exposed to hackers for 1 year.
Yes, Jeremiah Fowler, a researcher at Security Discovery found that the database was left unprotected for a decent amount of time leaving more than 957,000 healthcare records accessible to hackers.
The data which was exposed to hackers includes intimate details of employees like marital status, various internal communication records, job seeker and recruiter data, IP addresses, ports, pathways and storage data that would prove as a golden trove for hackers.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders said that the network admin working for Freedom Healthcare Staffing left the access configuration as ‘publicly accessible’ which allows anyone to download, edit, or delete data without any admin privileges.
Researcher Jeremiah Fowler claimed that the data stored on the cloud database includes a nurse being accused of taking a patient’s painkiller, hospital authorities blocking the nurses’ urge to form a union, usage of banned drugs on the premise and more such complex issues.
As soon as Flower brought the issue to the notice of the authorities, the issue was fixed by securing the database with a password and encrypting the data with an algorithm.
On a recent note, a research carried out by Ponemon Institute claims that hackers are nowadays interested in hacking the cloud database as it is proving as a gold mine for threat actors. And if the network admins leave the databases unprotected, then it makes it easy for hackers to access the data and sell in on the dark web for a premium price.
