198 personal data of millions of American voters were in the public domain. Information about their names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and even political preferences were discovered on an unsecured server Amazon S3.
UpGuard claims that the leak is the largest in the history of: the total amount of data was 1.1 TB, which is equivalent to 500 hours of video.
The Republican party monitored the behavior of voters
Unsecured data found to the employee IT company UpGuard, which is engaged in consulting in the field of cyber security. Analyst Chris Vickery found that personal information of voters were collected by order of the Republican party by the firms of Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint and Data Trust.
Database of dozens of tables was collected during elections in 2008 and 2012, as well as in the course of the election campaign of Donald trump. The latter, as the change dates back to January 2017 when the new President officially took office.
The incident sheds light on some of the nuances of the activities of the Republican party. As it turned out, the political power sought to influence the behavior of potential voters, predicting their reaction to those or other actions.
For these purposes, we use advanced algorithmic modeling is based on analysis of age, place of residence, nationality and 45 factors. Each voter in the database have an identification number. The latest table is made in 2016 — they are not all Americans, but only residents of Ohio and Florida.
The company DRA has claimed responsibility for the leak
At Deep Root Analytics explained — the data collected to help policymakers choose the best time for television broadcast and advertising spots.
Co-founder DRA Alex Landry confirmed the fact of information leakage. The company took full responsibility for the incident and reported that it occurred without her knowledge. Currently, the incident investigating — according to preliminary data, it is not related to the hacking.
The perpetrators of the leak said they have taken measures to protect the data.
Data of voters is not the first time become public
According to the company UpGuard, earlier information about voters has been in the public domain. In 2016, the network got personal data of 191 million Americans, and in 2016 — 87 million Mexicans.
