Home > News

More than 750,000 Birth Certificate Applications Were Left Unprotected Online

By Laura Tucker
News Birth Certificates Featured

It seems like nothing is safe anymore when it comes to online storage. Suffice it to say that if you have a document stored online, there’s a danger of it becoming public at some point or of having it hacked. Worse yet, sometimes the safety of your documents are just completely out of your control.

Even birth certificates. An online company that allows people to request a copy of their United States birth certificate exposed more than 750,000 applications. These applications were being stored on a cache that wasn’t protected by a password.

Birth Certificate Applications Vulnerable

Birth certificates are used for many reasons of verification of who you are. It’s a form of identification so that you can … get another form of identification, such as a driver’s license, passport, etc. If yours gets into the wrong hands, anyone could use that to obtain any information of you or even steal your identity.

Fidus Information Security, a company that does online penetration testing, discovered this egregious insecurity, with their discovery being verified by TechCrunch.

More than 752,000 applications for copies of birth certificates were found on an Amazon Web Services storage bucket. This same bucket also had 90,400 death certificate applications, but these couldn’t be accessed or downloaded as easily as the birth certificates. This bucket was nor protected with a password. This means anyone who could get the web address could access the information stored on these birth certificates.

News Birth Certificates Content

The application process differs by state, but the result is the same. People can use this service to apply to a state’s record-keeping bureau to obtain a copy of their birth. This usually includes their full name, date of birth, current home address, email, phone number, and historical personal information, including past addresses and names of family members, as well as the reason for requesting the birth certificate.

The applications that were found date back to 2017, but this doesn’t mean just babies born in the last two years, as you can request a copy of your birth certificate at various different times in your life. In just one week the company, which was not named by TechCrunch, added about 9,000 applications to the bucket.

Before the TechCrunch article was published, several emails were sent to warn the company of the exposed data, but they only received automated emails in return, with no action being taken. Amazon was reached but refused to intervene, yet agreed to inform their customer. The local data protection authority was notified as well.

No Excuses

There can be no excuses for this. Leaving such sensitive data open without even a password is just egregious. Just think of all the talk we do of security and privacy and measures that must be taken and that a simple password isn’t enough — this company didn’t even do that, not even a password.

What do you think should be done in this instance? Should this company be punished? Would that even matter, though, as the damage has already been done. Tell us what you think about these birth certificate applications being left unprotected online.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.