Recent developments:
- The CS professor whose expert opinion was quoted by the newspaper article is demanding an apology and legal expenses from the state, alleging that the governor defamed and violated his free speech rights.
- The governor's political fundraising committee is running ads making this a "fake news" issue.
The email that the reporter sent, in advance of publishing the article revealing the state education website's data leakage:
> “I recently discovered a significant exposure of the sensitive data of more than 100,000 teachers on a DESE website,” Renaud wrote to the agency’s communications chief, Mallory McGowin. “At this point I am confident what I found is a genuine vulnerability — I have confirmed with three teachers from different districts that their data was exposed. I also have consulted an UMSL cybersecurity researcher who verified my findings. The P-D plans to publish a story about this sensitive data exposure, but we wanted to inform DESE first so that you would have a chance to mitigate the problem.”
> Renaud shared his timeline for publishing the story and asked for interviews with officials from DESE and the Missouri Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division. In a second email sent about 45 minutes later, he described the steps he’d taken in finding and confirming the vulnerability.