A database has been discovered online which contains voter registration records of nearly 200 million Americans, 191 million to be precise, the database contains pieces of leaked personal information of the registered voters. The database has been discovered by a whitehat hacker, the good guys basically, though it’s unclear who is responsible for the misconfiguration that left this data open to the internet.
Security researcher Chris Vickery found a 300GB database of voter data which includes names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, party affiliations and logs of whether they voted in primary or general elections.
He tells Forbes that he has the entire 300GB database in his possession. The data dates back to the year 2000 and doesn’t seem to include more sensitive information like social security numbers of financial information.
Vickery confirmed the information was correct by looking up his own information in the database, he also looked up several police officers in his city and the data checked out. Other news outlets did the same and also found it to be accurate.
So far nobody has taken responsibility of this massive leak, most if not all political tech groups have denied that the database has anything to do with them. Vickery did reach out to the FBI field office in New York though the agency did not comment on the Forbes report.
It’s not unusual for campaigners to build such databases to reach out to potential voters effectively but many will find it alarming that personal information of nearly 200 million Americans has been left out in the open and that nobody is willing to own up to it.
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