Gov. Mike Parson is tired of these no-good, sophisticated hackers. He's not going back to it. It is too bad that the Missouri Republican doesn't know what he is talking about.
A Thursday press conference saw the confused elected official lash out at a journalist for reporting a vulnerability on an official Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. Notably, the reporter waited for officials to correct the error before publishing his story. What was the flaw? The HTML website included Social Security numbers for teachers.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that although no private information was visible or searchable on the web pages, it found that the HTML source codes of the pages were containing teachers' Social Security numbers.
Parson, who appears to have never heard of "view Source", obliquely threatened the Post reporter and threatened him with prosecution.
Parson wrote, "The state has committed to bring to justice anybody who hacked into our system and anyone who encouraged them to do this in accordance to what Missouri law permits AND requires."
To be clear, Parson was not aware of hacking, but he did understand that there was.
"We stand behind our reporting and our journalist who did everything right," Ian Caso (the president and publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch) stated to Mashable in a press release. "It is regrettable that the governor chose to shift blame onto journalists who discovered the problem and brought it up to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education."
To understand why this could have gone wrong, we reached out to the governor's office. We did not receive an immediate response.
His ramblings at Thursday's press conference (as reported by NBC News) speak for themselves.
SEE ALSO : Hackers Rickroll entire high school districts at once
Parson claimed that "this individual is not a victim." They were attempting to sell headlines and embarrass the state by compromising teachers' personal information. We won't let this crime against Missouri teachers get away with it, and we refuse for them to be part of the news outlet’s political vendetta.
Parson is, in other words: He doesn't know what he's talking.
