Chicago’s Board of Election Commissioners has said that personal information of almost 2 million registered voters in the city was exposed online publicly on an Amazon cloud server for an unknown period of time. The exposed personal information of the voters was compiled in a file that was discovered about a week ago by a researcher at a computer security firm.
Election officials were informed of the leak the following day and the file was taken down three hours after the officials were notified. The leak was reported to the public earlier this week.
It was a backup file that was stored on Amazon Web Services’ servers. The information in the file included voters’ social security numbers, names, addresses, and dates of birth. Driver’s license and state identification numbers of some voters were also included in the list.
Even though the file was stored on Amazon’s servers the leak isn’t Amazon’s fault. It only provides the cloud storage service and leaves the security configurations up to the user. By default, the cloud storage service is kept secure so someone within database manager and equipment contractor Election Systems & Software might have made the file public inadvertently.
Electronic Systems & Software has said that it’s reviewing its procedures and protocols to make sure that the data remains secure and that something like this doesn’t happen again in the future.
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