191 Million US Voters Information Exposed Due to Database Error
Some 191,337,174 million United States voters full names, home addresses, unique voter IDs, dates of birth and phone numbers were exposed last week due to a misconfigured database.
The database was discovered by security researcher Chris Vickery, who was able to access over 191 million Americans personal information that was sitting in the open for just about anyone to view. He made the discovery last week on December 20th, where the information still lies public.
Vickery is the same security researcher who exposed that 13 million of Mackeeper’s customer information was also sitting in the open due to a database error. Data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, passwords hashes, IP addresses and system information.
The security researcher who stumbled upon the information even found his own information among the other 191 million US voters. According to Vickery, the database totaled around 300GB in size, containing a massive amount of personal information.
Upon dissecting the massive 300GB database, Vickery discovered exposed information contained:
- First, middle and last name
- Home address
- Mailing address
- Phone number
- Gender
- Date of birth
- Unique Voter ID
- State Voter ID
- Date of voter registration
- Political affiliation
- Detailed voting history since 2000
- Field for voter prediction scores
Upon examination the amass of information, Vickery was able to not only find his own information, but even the personal information on a number of law enforcement agents in his own town. All due to a misconfigured database, leaking a huge amount of information.
Fortunately the database does not contain Social Security Numbers, drivers license numbers or any type of financial data on any of the 191 million voters. However, this is no excuse when it comes to protecting the privacy of hundreds of millions of US voters.
Whats even more shocking about the recent exposure of information is that no one is taking responsibility for the misconfigured database.
Vickery alongside his colleagues have reached out to various political tech organizations and known voting companies, all who have denied the database belongs to them or any company they are in direct affiliation with.
What even brings more mystery to the whole situation is that Vickery reached out to the FBI and Internet Crime Complaint Center who are just beginning to investigate to exposure, but have left the amass of 300GB of voter information online and accessible!
