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Millions of Texas Voter Records Exposed Online

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:41AM   
from the one-stop-voter-shopping dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

A massive trove of voter records containing personal information on millions of Texas residents has been found online.

The data — a single file containing an estimated 14.8 million records — was left on an unsecured server without a password. Texas has 19.3 million registered voters.

It's the latest exposure of voter data in a long string of security incidents that have cast doubt on political parties' abilities to keep voter data safe at a time where nation states are actively trying to influence elections.

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the file, which was first found by a New Zealand-based data breach hunter who goes by the pseudonym Flash Gordon. It's not clear who owned the server where the exposed file was found, but an analysis of the data reveals that it was likely originally compiled by Data Trust, a Republican-focused data analytics firm created by the GOP to provide campaigns with voter data.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, analyzed a portion of the data. (It was Vickery who found a larger trove of 198 million voter records last year exposed by a similar data firm Deep Root Analytics, which sourced much of its data from Data Trust.)

A spokesperson for Data Trust declined to comment on the record, but later gave a statement to the Austin American-Statesman denying a breach of its systems.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/millions-of-texas-voter-records-exposed-online/

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Original Submission

• Re:Voter info isn't private... Re:Voter info isn't private... (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 30 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)

  by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday August 30 2018, @03:55PM (#728302) Journal

  > several years’ worth of voting history

  If we're talking about how individuals actually voted, that info most certainly is private, and for good reason! However, voters have heaps of "opportunities" to tell the world how they voted, and protecting those who volunteer that info is a lot harder. Discrimination based on race, sex, and other things a person did not choose is unethical.

  But discrimination against people for how they voted? That is a choice they made. It's been customary and expected that a person should keep quiet about that, a sort of "don't ask, don't tell". If you don't keep quiet, and you get discriminated against for how you voted, well, that's on you, sorry.

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• Re:Voter info isn't private... (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday August 30 2018, @04:42PM

  by EvilSS (1456) on Thursday August 30 2018, @04:42PM (#728318)

  > If we're talking about how individuals actually voted In my county the data includes: Name, age, DOB, phone, address, registration date, registration number, city, county, tax district, precinct, several other "districts", and 10 years worth of voting data, including primary (R/D/I/Didn't Vote) and general elections (Voted/Didn't Vote). No one has HOW you voted, but they do include IF you voted and, in primaries, what party ballot you pulled. This info is generally available to anyone who is a party official, party committee member, candidate and their staff, and anyone who wants to advertise to voters on political issues (in my state at least it's illegal to use it for non-political advertising).

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