Prison Phone App Exposes Millions of Inmate Messages and Personal Data

guest · Sep 5, 2020

Prison Phone App Exposes Millions of Inmate Messages and Personal Data
September 4, 2020
https://gizmodo.com/prison-phone-app-exposes-millions-of-inmate-messages-an-1844957081

As many incarcerated individuals are having their visiting privileges restricted due to the global pandemic, Telmate’s Getting Out app has become one of the only options that families separated by incarceration have to keep in touch. But according to research published today, hundreds of millions of intimate messages from many millions of inmates were sitting exposed on the web.

The leak was first discovered by a CompariTech security researcher named Bob Diachenko, who shared a redacted sample of the exposed data with Gizmodo. It appears that along with the contents of the inmate’s communications, the exposed data contains detailed information about each inmate and who they were communicating with.
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The company said it is contacting affected users and assured that “we are committed to doing everything we can” to secure its data.

”At the core of all these exposures lies a human mistake,” Diachenko said in a video call interview. “Amazon, Microsoft, Elastic, Mongo, have all introduced pretty strict security policies that make customer data private by default. In order to make this public it had to be done manually. At the end of the day it’s often not a service that makes mistakes, but a person.”
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Comparitech: Prison phone service Telmate exposes messages, personal info of millions of inmates and their contacts

Inmates’ families and friends could be subject to harassment, assault, or discrimination based on their relationship with an inmate that would otherwise be private.
Inmates and their contacts could also be at risk of targeted fraud and phishing using the emails and phone numbers contained in the database.
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