Recently an independent computer
security researcher has uncovered a database of information on 190
million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an
incorrectly configured database.
This
database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations,
phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.S. states and Washington.
Chris Vickery who is the researcher and tech support specialist from
Austin, TX said he got the information when he was looking for another
info.
He said he need to raise awareness
of data leakage. He also said that he cannot tell whether others had
accessed the voters database. He also made it clear that the whole data
took a whole day for download. Voters data is considered to be a public,
but at the same time, getting database of all American voters might
endanger for fake ID's.
This data can be
more valuable to criminals looking for lists of large numbers of
targets for a variety of fraud schemes. Vickery assured that he is not
able to find who controls the database. He requested Federal Bureau of
Investigation to act swift.