SAN FRANCISCO (KNX) — A public records website inadvertently published approximately 260,000 confidential attorney discipline documents on Friday.
The incident, initially described as a “breach” possibly committed by hackers, was in fact due to a security glitch within the State Bar of California’s case management system, officials revealed Monday.
The State Bar learned the documents had gone public after someone who had complained about an attorney told an investigator with its Office of Chief Trial Counsel about JuryRecords.com, the site by which the documents were accessible on Friday.
JuryRecords.com removed the documents on Saturday.
The documents published included case numbers, statuses, as well as respondent and complaining witness names. Full case records were not displayed.
The site owner provided the State Bar with data reflecting website traffic when the records were live. There were approximately 1,000 associated page views by the public.
State law requires that all attorney disciplinary investigations conducted by the bar be confidential until formal charges are filed.
“We are working closely with [JuryRecords.com] to firmly identify the cases which were actually viewed,” the State Bar said in an email.
“It is now the State Bar’s belief that there was no malicious hack of its system,” the agency said in a statement. Instead, it appeared a previously unknown vulnerability in the bar’s case management portal allowed non-public records to be collected by JuryRecords.com.
The bar said it was working with Tyler Technologies, the maker of the case management portal system, to “remediate the security vulnerability” which “may not be unique to the State Bar’s implementation and could impact other users.”
“Our obligation and responsibility are to the respondents and witnesses whose nonpublic information may have been shared,” a State Bar spokesperson told The Orange County Register. “We thank [JuryRecords.com] for quickly removing the files.”
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