Texas-based computer security researcher Chris Vickery has discovered online personal data of approximately 191 million registered U.S. voters that he believes have potentially been exposed by a database misconfiguration, CSO Online reported Monday.Steve Ragan writes Vickery found the open repository lists full names of voters and their residential addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, voter IDs and prediction scores, political affiliations and voting history details.
CSO Online and Databreach.net have separately contacted multiple political data companies in an effort to identify the online database’s administrator but none of them claimed ownership, Ragan reports.
Ragan said the personal content in the database could be used by cyber criminals to conduct election-related phishing attacks.
Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz of Reuters reported that voter information is generally considered as public data and U.S. states have different regulations to protect such records.
Vickery told Reuters that he will collaborate with government authorities to determine the voter database owner and urged it to remove the repository from public view as part of Vickery’s cybersecurity awareness efforts.
