Data of nearly 200m US voters exposed

WASHINGTON — The detailed data of nearly 200 million US registered voters were leaked online, local media reported on Monday. The leak was discovered by the security company UpGuard, which said the data came from three analytics companies hired by the Republican Party.

Names, birth dates, addresses and other voter registration details of some 198 million voters were leaked, according to UpGuard. The number of overall US registered voters was just more than 200 million.

The 1.1 terabytes of data were discovered on June 12 in an unprotected cache on the internet, but secured by June 14.

Deep Root, a company involved in leaking the information, said the data was exposed on June 1 after a system update.

The leaked info exposed the extent to which US political entities analyzed voter behaviors in order to capitalize on predictions made on the basis of those analysis.

The information was described as “a treasure trove of political data and modeled preferences used by the Trump campaign”, and the discovery offered a rare glimpse into the sophisticated voter targeting efforts used by the Trump camp during the White House race.

Deep Root said in a statement it could not comment on specific clients but that it recently became aware “that a number of files within our online storage system were accessed without our knowledge”.

The statement added that the data accessed included “proprietary information as well as voter data that is publicly available and readily provided by state government offices”.

“We take full responsibility for this situation,” the company said, adding that it was conducting an investigation with outside experts.

The data company said it was not aware of any parties that accessed this data other than UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery.

UpGuard said this was the largest known breach of voter data in history and represented the equivalent of 10 billion pages of text.

It said the files offer insights into the strategy used by Trump’s campaign to target voters based on “data points” fed into an algorithmic formula.

The exposure “raises significant questions about the privacy and security Americans can expect for their most privileged information,” the researchers said.