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.
The data
trove was apparently made public by accident by one of the
data-mining companies that compiled it. It includes a mix of private
information and data gleaned from public voter rolls: “the
voter’s date of birth, home and mailing addresses, phone number,
registered party, self-reported racial demographic, voter
registration status” as well as computer “modeled”
speculation about each person’s race and religion, according to an
analysis provided to The Intercept.
The leak was
discovered by Chris Vickery, an analyst at the U.S. cybersecurity
firm UpGuard, who last year discovered an enormous breach of Mexican
voter data and in 2015 a 300GB leak of records of 191 million voters.
This new incident is more extensive, according the analysis, written
by UpGuard:
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.
Full
report:
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