Republican Data Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information For Virtually Every American Voter

[Falsedawn]

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/19...formation-for-virtually-every-american-voter/

THE GOP’S 2016 presidential upset wasn’t surprising just because it put Donald Trump in the White House; it also proved the party had vastly improved its ability to exploit data, including precision ad targeting campaigns on Facebook. Now comes the fallout of all that information hoarding: A California-based security researcher says Republican-linked election databases were inadvertently exposed to the entire internet, sans password, potentially violating the privacy of almost every single registered voter in the United States.

UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team can now confirm that unsecured databases containing the sensitive personal details of over 198 million American voters was left exposed to the internet. The data, which was stored in a publicly accessible cloud server owned by Republican data firm Deep Root Analytics, included 1.1 terabytes of entirely unsecured personal information compiled by DRA and at least two other contractors, TargetPoint Consulting, Inc. and Data Trust. In total, the personal information of nearly all of America’s 200 million registered voters was exposed, including their names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as voter ethnicities and religions as “modeled” by the firms’ data scientists.

No commentary for this one, mainly a PSA to keep up with your credit reports and whatnot. This has the potential to be a particularly nasty security breach.

Protip: Don't leave your information publicly accessible sans password, especially when it's not your information to begin with.

 

[Bubzeh]

Well I am shocked.

 

[Scheme]

Undeniable proof that Hillary Clinton coordinated with the Russians to attack American voters.

We need an investigation into Clinton's ties with Russia to attempt to undermine our democracy.

 

[RerouteToRemain]

Well that sucks. They definitely need to be held liable for damages.

 

[lecter]

I'll buy the data set as soon as it's available on a darknet market for sure <cheer>

In case somebody actually has a copy. It's data leakage in the sense of information which was supposed to be treated confidentially was accessible from an untrusted environment. So far nobody knows if anybody actually accessed it.