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Hacker Discovers 191 Million American Voters’ Database Leak

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Short Bytes: Recently an open US voter database leak was discovered by Chris Vickery, a white hat hacker. This database contains information about 191 million US citizens including their personal information. Agencies responsible for campaigns which require users database deny the act. FBI has been informed about the same situation lately.

A database containing registration information about 191 million American citizens and various pieces of personal information was recently uncovered by a whitehat hacker. It is said that it happened due to the misconfiguration of the database which was left open for the access.

Researcher Chris Vickery, uncovered this database which was left open for everyone to access. In his conversation with Forbes, he says he got access to almost 300GB of voter data including names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, party affiliations, and logs of whether or not they had voted in primary or general elections. However, this database does not contain any financial information or any information related to social security number.

Chris Vickery, after discovering the open database, verified the authenticity of it by looking up for his own information in the database table and also looking up for the information about the several police officers in his city of Texas. Just to reverify after not believing himself, he put in his parents name and to his surprise, it was there in the database with a flash of seconds.

Also read: Man Hires “Hacker” to Erase $16,000 Fine, Actually Hires Undercover Cop and Goes to Prison

Later to verify the company which is responsible for the setting up digital campaigns for the political parties, Vickery chased NationBuilder believing that certain markers in the database pointed to a NationBuilder-designed database. However, A NationBuilder spokesperson denied by saying that the IP address linked to the leaked database was not one of theirs, and the IP address was not related to any of their hosted clients.

Well, it could then be a non-hosted NationBuilder customer, responsible for the misconfiguration. The provider’s CEO Jim Gilliam said,

“It is possible that some of the information it contains may have come from data we make available for free to campaigns. From what we’ve seen, the voter information included is already publicly available from each state government so no new or private information was released in this database. We strongly believe in making voter information more accessible to political campaigns and advocacy groups, so we provide cleaned versions of that publicly accessible information to them for free.”

As of now no one has taken the responsibility for the leak. The FBI New York field office and Internet Crime Complaint Center were contacted by DataBreaches.net and Vickery too.

So, what do you think about such casual act of playing around with common people in US? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

Also read: Your Password Manager 1Password Leaks Your Account’s Important Metadata

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