quote:

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.

Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.

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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.

(More in the link above)

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Originally posted by JimTheo:
I will repeat my mantra, despite the exhortations to the contrary, to NEVER put super critical data into the cloud!!! Never. Ever. As. Long. As. It.Lives.

Multiple break ins to every conceivable public storage configuration happens ALL the time.

Never. Ever.

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
Is that 198 million Republican voters? How do we ever lose any election?

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Originally posted by TigerDore:

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
Is that 198 million Republican voters? How do we ever lose any election?

Because 93 million die every day due to gun violence.

quote:

Originally posted by JimTheo:
I will repeat my mantra, despite the exhortations to the contrary, to NEVER put super critical data into the cloud!!! Never. Ever. As. Long. As. It.Lives.

Multiple break ins to every conceivable public storage configuration happens ALL the time.

Never. Ever.

quote:

Originally posted by JimTheo:
I will repeat my mantra, despite the exhortations to the contrary, to NEVER put super critical data into the cloud!!! Never. Ever. As. Long. As. It.Lives.

Multiple break ins to every conceivable public storage configuration happens ALL the time.

Never. Ever.

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:

quote:

Originally posted by JimTheo:
I will repeat my mantra, despite the exhortations to the contrary, to NEVER put super critical data into the cloud!!! Never. Ever. As. Long. As. It.Lives.

Multiple break ins to every conceivable public storage configuration happens ALL the time.

Never. Ever.

This is just ONE of the reasons my company is NOT going to any cloud services for certain systems. THAT kind of data should be kept internal and well protected. I guess you could call this IT incompetence on a gargantuan scale. Good lord.

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