The personal voter registration information of more than 191 million Americans has been exposed via a publicly available database, according to a new report from DataBreaches.net.
White hat hacker Chris Vickery said a misconfiguration of the database allowed him to obtain 300 gigabytes of voter data from 191,337,174 Americans, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, party affiliations and detailed voting history since 2000, reported Forbes.
There are no Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers or any financial information in the database.
Vickery was able to confirm that the information was correct by looking up his own name along with several police officers in his city.
"My immediate reaction was disbelief," said Vickery, according to CSO. "I needed to know if this was real, so I quickly located the Texas records and ran a search for my own name. I was outraged at the result. Sitting right in front of my eyes, in a strange, random database I had found on the Internet, were details that could lead anyone straight to me. How could someone with 191 million such records be so careless?"
Forbes reporter Thomas Fox-Brewster also gave Vickery his parents' surname and hometown, which were quickly found in the database, leading Fox-Brewster to conclude that it appears as though "every registered U.S. voter is included in the leak."
While most of the information in the database is public record, marketers and political campaigns could exploit the data, or criminals may be able to use it along with other information to commit fraud, noted Engadget.
It's not clear who originally managed the database, and all political tech groups contacted by CSO — Catalist, Political Data, Aristotle, L2 Political and NGP VAN — denied responsibility.
Vickery and DataBreaches.net have contacted the FBI's New York field office and the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
