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December 28, 2015 by Gary Price

A Misconfigured Database Causes 191 Million Voters’ Personal Info to Be Exposed

December 28, 2015 by Gary Price

As you’ll read, research by three security experts have yet to find the person(s)/organization(s) responsible for the misconfiguration and exposure. An example of technology only being as good as the people who develop and IMPLEMENT it.
Also, make sure to note the section of the article on public access to voter registration data available online.
From Databreaches.net:

A misconfigured database leaking the personal information of over 191 million voters was reported to DataBreaches.net by researcher Chris Vickery. This report includes some of the results of an investigation by Vickery, DataBreaches.net, and Steve Ragan of Salted Hash.
On December 20, researcher Chris Vickery contacted DataBreaches.net to say he had found a database with 191,337,174 million Americans’ voter information exposed due to a misconfiguration of the database.
[Clip]
Steve began contacting some big political consulting and software firms, as he reports today over on Salted Hash. So far, none of those leads has resulted in identifying the owner of the leaky database.
Thankfully, there are no Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, or any financial information in this particular database, but full name, date of birth, and address and phone number with political party and other fields – are problematic enough when it comes to protecting our privacy and security.
[Clip]
More than one week after Vickery first discovered the leak and we began trying to locate the responsible party, the database remains online and exposed – despite countless hours on our part trying to track this leak down.

Much More in the Complete Article
Note: The article is sometimes hard to access. If this is a problem, visit the Bing or Google cache to read the full text.

Filed under: Data Files, News, Reports

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About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.

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