Gov. Mike Parson appears to be shooting the messenger with his baffling and unfounded “hacking” accusation against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The newspaper recently discovered vulnerable data on a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s web application.
A Post-Dispatch reporter’s research found more than 100,000 Social Security numbers of Missouri school teachers, administrators and counselors were vulnerable to public exposure.
As we reported last week, the paper delayed publication of its reporting to give the department time to remedy the flawed web application and assess potential flaws within other state government websites. Then it published its story.
That’s what newspapers do in their watchdog role. It acted responsibly by alerting DESE before publishing the story.
Parson’s response was as if a Russian hacker was cyber-attacking our state.
“We also do not know why this individual is seeking to access, convert and take personal information from Missouri teachers,” Parson said in a news conference Thursday. “But let me be clear, this administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who will attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians.”
Huh? This was information found in the web page’s source code. A lot of children not old enough to drive know how to right-click a web page and then click “view source code.”
This isn’t a case of someone divining secret passwords, breaching firewalls or offloading data from secure sites.
And it wasn’t done with malicious intent. It was done to attract readers and to alert people to a problem that needed attention.
We get that Parson and the Post- Dispatch aren’t besties. Parson is conservative and the Post-Dispatch’s editorial slant is liberal. Parson often has been a target on the paper’s opinion pages.
However, the governor needs to pick his fights more carefully. This wasn’t a hacking attack. It was just good journalism.
We hope the governor backs off the Post-Dispatch and doubles down on making sure the state’s sensitive data is secure.
News Tribune