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Thread: Unsecured "Deep Data" server left 198 million people's sensitive data exposed

  1. #1

    Exclamation Unsecured "Deep Data" server left 198 million people's sensitive data exposed

    Welcome to the Brave New World, where we are nothing but data bits to mined, folded, mutilated and spindled at will.



    198 million Americans hit by "largest ever" voter records leak

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/securit...voter-records/

    Personal data on 198 million voters, including analytics data that suggests who a person is likely to vote for and why, was stored on an unsecured Amazon server.

    A huge trove of voter data, including personal information and voter profiling data on what's thought to be every registered US voter dating back more than a decade, has been found on an exposed and unsecured server, ZDNet has learned.

    It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date.

    The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics.

    UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication.

    This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign.

    Through a handful of companies, including data firms, market researchers, and analytics providers, the GOP replicated that Obama campaign strategy by helping its political candidates make data-based decisions about their campaigns.

    The exposed records include files provided by Data Trust, a data warehouse created by the GOP to serve as its exclusive data provider of voter records. The company sells and supplies voter data to political candidates, who rely on access to the data in order to shape their campaigns.

    According to UpGuard, the folder includes dozens of spreadsheets containing a unique GOP identifier for each voter for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, which link to "dozens of sensitive and personally identifying data points, making it possible to piece together a striking amount of detail on individual Americans specified by name." A folder containing 2016 data only included files for Ohio and Florida, two crucial battleground states.

    Each record lists a voter's name, date of birth, home address, phone number, and voter registration details, such as which political party a person is registered with. The data also includes "profiling" information, voter ethnicities and religions, and various other kinds of information pertinent to a voter's political persuasions and preferences, as modeled by the firms' data scientists, in order to better target political advertising.

    Senior executives at Data Trust would not speak on the record prior to publication.

    The exposed server was also found to contain gigabytes of data from TargetPoint, a conservative market research firm focused on helping candidates better understand voters' policy preferences and political actions. Some of these files, says UpGuard, contain millions of entries that appear to rate voters on the post-election likelihood of supporting a certain policy, candidate, or belief on a scale of "very unlikely" to "very likely."
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  3. #2
    they have all this fancy data, but still can't help but waste money sending me donation requests for douchebag gop members that I would NEVER vote for, let alone donate towards.

  4. #3

    Don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by specsaregood View Post
    they have all this fancy data, but still can't help but waste money sending me donation requests for douchebag gop members that I would NEVER vote for, let alone donate towards.
    TOo bad the libertarians aren't doing this.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by angelatc View Post
    TOo bad the libertarians aren't doing this.
    I guess I just assumed they didn't have the resources.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by specsaregood View Post
    they have all this fancy data, but still can't help but waste money sending me donation requests for douchebag gop members that I would NEVER vote for, let alone donate towards.
    They just spam everyone and hope that .1% replies. They aren't trying for quality just quantity.

  8. #7
    Nice:



    This reporter was able, after determining his RNC ID, to view his modeled policy preferences and political actions as calculated by TargetPoint. It is a testament both to their talents, and to the real danger of this exposure, that the results were astoundingly accurate.
    “I don’t think that there will be any curtailing of Donald Trump as president,” he said. "He controls the media, he controls the sentiment [and] he controls everybody. He’s the one who will resort to executive orders more so than [President] Obama ever used them." - Ron Paul

  9. #8
    This is how people can be targeted for their political views, if it happened to Dan Savage's poodle it can happen to you. I wonder if anyone really cares that in spite of claims about Russian interference in the US election, Stone, at a disadvantage, tried to shift the talk to Israel. The source said they “watched from behind [their] hands” as Stone said words to the effect of: “Israel had far more involvement in the US election than Russia.



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  11. #9
    Events are on the march. Paper ballots are not as easy to get rid of, most machines can be recalibrated.
    Remember the scene in the movie FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OF where the propped up fancy car that is
    having its miles rolled back flies off into the woods from the garage? Think odometer. Think Big Brother.



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