“Another cache of US voter data has leaked,” Zack Whittaker reports for ZDNet. “A Virginia-based political campaign and robocalling company, which claims it can ‘reach thousands of voters instantly,’ left a huge batch of files containing hundreds of thousands of voter records on a public and exposed Amazon S3 bucket that anyone could access without a password.”
“The bucket contained close to 2,600 files, including spreadsheets and audio recordings, for several US political campaigns,” Whittaker reports. “Kromtech Security’s Bob Diachenko, who discovered the exposed data and blogged his findings, shared prior to publication several screenshots of data, packed with voters’ full names, home addresses, and political affiliations.”
“The data also included gender, phone numbers, age, and birth year, as well as a jurisdiction breakdown based on district or zip code and other demographics, like ethnicity, language spoken, and education,” Whittaker reports. “Several columns in the data also included a calculation of how a person might vote, such as ‘weak Democrat’ or ‘hard Republican,’ or ‘swing’ voter.”
“The Robocent exposure is believed to be at least the fifth major breach of voter data in as many years,” Whittaker reports. “Before the 2016 presidential election, a database of 191 million voter records was exposed, topped two years later with a breach of 198 million voter records — almost every registered US voter, believed to be the largest voter data breach in history.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, “privacy” in “modern” times. Ain’t it grand?
Never answer a political (or other type) of phone survey for just these kinds of reasons.
Oh this just keeps getting funnier and funnier. I’d not be surprised if Karma is involved here.
I have neve understood why, when registering to vote in the USA, the question of your political party prefs are part of the process. It’s nobody’s damn business. The question is never asked here in Canada.
And the people that answers that. Not good.