Cyber Criminals Hack Marijuana Tracking Software

March 01, 2018

Since this last presidential election, the US has been gripped by the fear and obsession of cyber criminal’s infringements. This paranoia is not entirely irrational. Recently a tracking software, used by marijuana companies in different states, was hacked.

The news has been reported by different media outlets including tech websites and portals for marijuana business trade news.

According to these reports, software with the name MJ Freeway is being used by several cannabis businesses in the states where MMJ or recreational cannabis has been legalized. The software is used to track the seed-to-sale journey of cannabis. It is developed by a Denver-based software house. According to the company’s own account, its server and backup system was inaccessible for a whole day in the first week of January.

This hacking activity affected the business of nearly 1000 retail stores because of the disruption in the management operations of regulatory compliance and inventory performed through the software. The crisis was spiraled out of control to an extent where some stores had to entirely halt their operations.

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Jeannette Ward is the director of marketing and data at the company. According to her, the initial findings suggest that it was an intentional assault on the infrastructure of their company.

The consequences of this cyber attack were very broad in their impact. From Arizona to Massachusetts, legalized cannabis operations got severely affected. For instance, an MMJ dispensary in Tuscan, Arizona had to issue a statement on social media that they can’t process any transaction because of their unresponsive inventory system. Similarly, an MMJ company New England Treatment Access also had its dispensaries affected from the cyber attack. Their employees at Northampton and Brookline dispensaries had to manually look over the sales operations, which resulted in delayed transactions.

Cannabis companies with backup systems managed to operate amid this delay. For instance, a marijuana dispensary located in the state of Nevada devised a manual system since the beginning of their operations because they were aware of the glitches of digital systems. Owner of the dispensary, Frank Hawkins, said that they had managed to serve 98 percent of their patients in the midst of the hack with transactions taking 10 to 20 minutes more than usual.

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However, hackers were only able to halt the system instead of stealing the data of the company’s retail clients. According to Ward, the data breach is prevented due to the software’s complex encryption model. Moreover, the cyber attack was only limited to the company’s existing operational system. A newly-built platform by the company remained unharmed from the shenanigans of the attackers. This revamped software is designed to cater the budding legal cannabis market, which particularly witnessed a considerable growth following adult-use legalization in the most populous state of the country.

MJ freeway experienced a similar technical hiccup four years ago when their server went down for several days. At that time, they were not serving too many cannabis businesses and there were still few states with legalized MMJ and adult-use programs.

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