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A data-analytics firm hired by the Republican National Committee last year to gather political information about US voters accidentally leaked the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens earlier this month, as its database was left exposed on the open web for nearly two weeks. Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm contracted by the RNC as part of a push to ramp up its voter-analytics operation in the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat in the 2012 presidential election, stored details of about 61% of the US population on an Amazon cloud server without password protection for those two weeks.
The data, according to UpGuard's analysis, "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." The information did not include highly sensitive information like Social Security numbers, and much of it was publicly available voter-registration data provided by state government officials, a company spokesman told Business Insider.
But the exposed database combined people's personal information and political inclinations — including proprietary information gathered via predictive modeling tools — to create a detailed profile of nearly 200 million Americans that would be a "gold mine" for anyone looking to target and manipulate voters, said Archie Agarwal, the founder of the cybersecurity firm ThreatModeler. "This is the mother lode of all leaks," Agarwal said Monday. "Governments are made or broken on this. I don't even have the words to describe it."
Credits: http://www.businessinsider.com/deep-root-leaks-voter-data-russia-2017-6
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