Local Editor

The existence of an enormous database of 191 million American voters was revealed on December 20th by "whitehat" hacker Chris Vickery. The database content includes citizens' full names, home addresses and phone numbers.

If you voted in a US election since 2000, beware: your personal information may be out in the open. The dating back to 2000 PPI [personal identifying information] of 191 million US citizens registered to vote seems to have no owner, it was just out there, available for anyone who finds it.

Meanwhile, finding a person responsible for the misconfiguration turned out not to be an easy task. Vickery and DataBreaches.net, the company the researcher contacted to share his findings, addressed various political tech groups and known voter information companies on the issue, but all denied they had anything to do with the database.

Monday, Vickery wrote on Reddit: "To be very clear, this was not a hack," adding that "no password or other authentication is required at all. Anyone with an Internet connection can grab all 300+ gigabytes."

As for now, Vickery claims he has his hands on 300GB of voter data, including birth dates, voting history, party affiliations, unique voter IDs etc. He found his own name in the database, too, and after checking the information, confirmed it was correct. In parallel, DataBreaches.com confirmed the records are real.

Even though the database did not contain Social Security Numbers, driver license numbers, or any other financial data, it is still a dismaying violation of privacy and a threat to security. "The consequences of the information getting in the wrong hands could be severe," Vickery asserted.

However, Vickery and DataBreaches.net were reaching out to authorities, including the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center to shut down access to the database.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team