Marijuana growing social website GrowDiaries has suffered a data breach with the details of 3.4 million users being exposed online.

First discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko and detailed today on LinkedIn, the data exposure came on an unsecured database that had no password. The data include email addresses, IP addresses, usernames, user posts, MD5-hashed passwords and image URLs.

The exposed database was discovered by Diachenko Oct. 10 but was notably was indexed by the search engine BinaryEdge Sept. 22. The database was not taken down until Oct. 15.

GrowDiaries is reported to have confirmed the database exposure but has not said whether user details have been accessed from unwanted third parties.

“This breach is yet another example of a company leaving a server and critical information unsecured without any password protection, an unfortunate trend that has been the cause of many recent leaks,” Dr. Vinay Sridhara, chief technology officer of security posture firm Balbix Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “The encrypted passwords are particularly worrisome because MD5 has various known security flaws, enabling an attacker to easily hack and access them. Online sites such as GrowDiaries that require users to create accounts and that collect personal data should at the very least implement basic cyberhygiene.”

Rusty Carter, chief product officer at security operations company LogRhythm Inc,. noted that GrowDiaries users are now vulnerable to a number of attacks and threats. “This raises the risk of credential stuffing, which occurs when attackers leverage stolen passwords from one website for use across multiple different places since many people tend to reuse their credentials,” he warned.

Anurag Kahol, chief technology officer and co-founder of cloud access security broker firm Bitglass Inc., added that “affected users are placed at great risk of having other online accounts with sensitive data compromised in credential stuffing attacks. In fact, four out of five global data breaches are perpetrated from stolen passwords.”

Photo: GrowDiaries