Current Events > The personal data of 198 million Americans has leaked

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files

In what is the largest known data exposure of its kind, UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team can now confirm that a misconfigured database containing the sensitive personal details of over 198 million American voters was left exposed to the internet by a firm working on behalf of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in their efforts to elect Donald Trump. The data, which was stored in a publicly accessible cloud server owned by Republican data firm Deep Root Analytics, included 1.1 terabytes of entirely unsecured personal information compiled by DRA and at least two other Republican contractors, TargetPoint Consulting, Inc. and Data Trust. In total, the personal information of potentially near all of America’s 200 million registered voters was exposed, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as data described as “modeled” voter ethnicities and religions.

This disclosure dwarfs previous breaches of electoral data in Mexico (also discovered by Vickery) and the Philippines by well over 100 million more affected individuals, exposing the personal information of over sixty-one percent of the entire US population.

The data exposure provides insight into the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s $100 million data operation for the 2016 presidential election, an undertaking of monumental scope and painstaking detail launched in the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint, and Data Trust—all Republican data firms—were among the RNC-hired outfits working as the core of the Trump campaign’s 2016 general election data team, relied upon in the GOP effort to influence potential voters and accurately predict their behavior. The RNC data repository would ultimately acquire roughly 9.5 billion data points regarding three out of every five Americans, scoring 198 million potential US voters on their likely political preferences using advanced algorithmic modeling across forty-eight different categories.

Spreadsheets containing this accumulated data—last updated around the January 2017 presidential inauguration—constitute a treasure trove of political data and modeled preferences used by the Trump campaign. This data was also exposed in the misconfigured database and had been for an unknown period of time.

UpGuard’s discovery — of perhaps the largest known exposure of voter information in history—is corroborated by technical evidence, as well as by the public statements of the responsible firms and political staffers.

In the early evening of June 12th, UpGuard Cyber Risk Analyst Chris Vickery discovered an open cloud repository while searching for misconfigured data sources on behalf of the Cyber Risk Team, a research unit of UpGuard devoted to finding, securing, and raising public awareness of such exposures. The data repository, an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket, lacked any protection against access. As such, anyone with an internet connection could have accessed the Republican data operation used to power Donald Trump’s presidential victory, simply by navigating to a six-character Amazon subdomain: “dra-dw”.

Upon inspection of the contents, “dra-dw” is shown to stand for “Deep Root Analytics Data Warehouse.” The concept of a “data warehouse” is common in modern business— essentially, it is a massive collection of data prepared specifically for complex analysis. Deep Root Analytics confirmed they owned and operated the dra-dw bucket, which was subsequently secured against public access the night of June 14th, shortly after Vickery notified federal authorities.

In total, 1.1 terabytes of data in the warehouse—an amount roughly equivalent to 500 hours worth of video—was fully downloadable.

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Ha

I didn't vote
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26_Sandman_39 posted...

tl;dr

So if I didn't vote for Trump I'm good right?

Nope. You're still in there.
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26_Sandman_39 posted...

tl;dr

So if I didn't vote for Trump I'm good right?

Nope.
In total, the personal information of potentially near all of America’s 200 million registered voters was exposed
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what if i never registered to vote, like a sane person?

Crap. Now I'll be getting more junk mail with birthday coupons.
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26_Sandman_39 posted...

FighterStreet posted...

what if i never registered to vote, like a sane person?

Then you wouldn't be a sane person.

huh i guess my sentence does suck, oh well

o_O

...That's almost 2/3 of the us population. Fuck.
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lol voting
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26_Sandman_39 posted...

1 in 200 million chance of having something happen to me, I guess. I probably am at a bigger risk when I forget to rip up my checks.

Uh, that number is basically almost everyone who voted.
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But emails!
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gonna laugh if that shit was stored in plain text or something stupid like that
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so now they can either send you to the camps if you voted Hillary


or send you to the camps in 2020 or when Trump is impeached if you voted Trump
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wasn't expecting the article to go this deep into detail

this is actually pretty fascinating
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accidents happen. this really isnt that big of a deal
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mario2000 posted...

gonna laugh if that shit was stored in plain text or something stupid like that

Sounds like it was a db2 db, with extremely easy to understand column names, according to reddit.

Bluebomber182 posted...

accidents happen. this really isnt that big of a deal

Lmfao
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Wow so Republicans didn't vote for Trump confirmed? This is 100 million more needed than his actual vote tally.
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