More than 50 state and local court systems across the country exposed medical records from child abuse victims, police body camera footage, and other sealed documents through unsecured websites.n September 2023, security researcher Jason Parker received an urgent message from an activist who had stumbled across a massive flaw in the Monroe County, Florida’s court case system: Sealed records were easily accessible via the court’s website.
Court records are sealed for good reason: to protect the safety of an abused spouse or child, a witness who spoke up against a criminal or simply to maintain the personal privacy of victims and people accused of crimes. In the instances described above, sealed court records were exposed to scrapers and crawlers, which means that millions of records could have easily been hoovered up and sold or given to identity thieves, extortionists, or even foreign governments.
a statement stating that the county is “diligent in maintaining the latest security enhancements to our system, with the goal of preventing any breach.”This isn’t the first time legal recordkeeping systems have suffered from major vulnerabilities. In February 2022, the California Bar announced that someone had hacked into its systems, accessed more than 260,000 confidential attorney discipline records and published them on a public records aggregation website called judyrecords.com.
Tyler Technologies wasn’t responsible for all, or even most, of the compromised systems that Parker found. There was no single “weak link” across them to blame. There are thousands of different state and local court records systems in the United States today, and Tyler is just one of a cluster of companies that build them. Many systems, including the ones used by the five Florida counties that started Parker’s investigation, were built by state employees themselves.
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