Shocking: 198 Million of U.S. Voters data leaked online

Over 198 Million registered U.S. voter records were accidentally leaked online due to an indecently configured security setting by a firm (Deep Root Analytics) working on behalf of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in their efforts to elect Donald Trump. This firm had left voting records of 198 million Americans exposed on the internet and accessible to anyone, a California-based cyber-security firm, UpGuard said.

The data was stored in a publicly accessible cloud server owned by Republican data firm Deep Root Analytics. Vickery, who was working as part of UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team, discovered a data repository containing data of 198 million U.S. voters on Amazon Web Services on June 12, and downloaded a total of 1.1 terabytes of unsecured personal information compiled by DRA and at least two other Republican contractors, TargetPoint Consulting and Data Trust, which is equivalent to 500 hours of video.

The data was secured on June 14, thanks to the cyber security firm. Vickery said that the data was not password protected.

The leaked information contains names, birth dates, addresses, home addresses voter registration details, phone numbers, party affiliation, racial demographics and voter registration status, as well as data described as “modeled” voter ethnicities and religions.

On the other hand, the texts from those posts would be useful for training computers to recognize language sentiment or to watch explicit subreddits to check the people’s interest on political topics.

The leaked information provides an insight into the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s $100 million data operation for the 2016 operational election.

Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint, and Data Trust, all Republican data firms, were among the RNC-hired firms. They work as the core of the Trump campaign’s 2016 general election data team.

“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,” UpGuard said in a statement.

Spreadsheets contain the collected data, which is updated lastly in the month of January 2017 i.e. presidential inauguration. It contains a treasure trove of political data and modeled preferences used by the Trump campaign. This political data was also exposed in the misconfigured database.

Discovery of misconfigured database:

UpGuard Cyber Risk Analyst, Chris Vickery discovered an open cloud repository while searching for misconfigured data sources in the early evening of June 12^th.

The data repository, an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket, lacked any protection against access. He said that anyone can access the Republican data operation used to power Donald Trump’s presidential victory by simply navigating to a six-character Amazon subdomain: “dra-dw”.

After a thorough research, he concluded that “dra-dw” stands for “Deep Root Analytics Data Warehouse”. After that, DRA confirmed that the dra-dw bucket, which was subsequently secured against public access the night of June 14th, shortly after Vickery notified federal authorities belongs to them.

These leaked files were clear indications of the repository’s political importance, with file directories named for a number of high-powered and influential Republican political organizations.

Deep Root Analytics Warehouse includes a significant amount of fully accessible data. Vickrey also found an additional 24 terabytes of data that was stored in the warehouse but had been configured to prevent public access.

Ultimately, the amount of data stored in the misconfigured database was equivalent in size to about 10 billion pages of text.

He also found a large cache of Reddit posts, which look like:

Vickrey downloaded these files, 1.1 TB of publicly accessible files from June 12^th to June 14^th. These files included two critical directories titled “data_trust” and “target_point”, where they represent the personal information of 198 million potential voters.

The database consisted of two file repositories:

·         A 256 GB folder for the 2008 presidential election

·         A 233 GB folder for 2012

They contain fifty-one files, one for every state, as well as the District of Columbia. It had been noticed that each file is formatted as a comma separated value (.csv), lists an internal, 32-character alphanumeric “RNC ID”—such as, for example, 530C2598-6EF4-4A56-9A7X-2FCA466FX2E2, which is used to spot every potential voter in the database.

The IDs help to identify sensitive information making it possible to gather every possible information specified by name.

Listed here are the .csv categories:

"RNCID", "RNC_RegID", "State", "SOURCEID", "Juriscode", "Jurisname", "CountyFIPS", "MCD", "CNTY", "Town", "Ward", "Precinct", "Ballotbox", "PrecinctName", "CD_Current", "CD_NextElection", "SD_Current", "SDProper_Current", "SD_NextElection", "SDProper_NextElection", "LD_Current", "LDS_Current", "LDProper_Current", "LD_NextElection", "LDS_NextElection", "LDProper_NextElection", "NamePrefix", "FirstName", "MiddleName", "LastName", "NameSuffix", "Sex", "BirthYear", "BirthMonth", "BirthDay", "OfficialParty", "StateCalcParty", "RNCCalcParty", "StateVoterID", "JurisdictionVoterID", "AffidavitID", "LegacyID", "LastActiveDate", "RegistrationDate", "VoterStatus", "PermAbs", "SelfReportedDemographic", "ModeledEthnicity", "ModeledReligion", "ModeledEthnicGroup", "HHSEQ", "HTSEQ", "RegistrationAddr1", "RegistrationAddr2", "RegHouseNum", "RegHouseSfx", "RegStPrefix", "RegStName", "RegStType", "RegstPost", "RegUnitType", "RegUnitNumber", "RegCity", "RegSta", "RegZip5", "RegZip4", "RegLatitude", "RegLongitude", "RegGeocodeLevel", "RADR_LastCleanse", "RADR_LastGeoCode", "RADR_LastCOA", "ChangeOfAddress", "COADate", "COAType", "MailingAddr1", "MailingAddr2", "MailHouseNum", "MailHouseSfx", "MailStPrefix", "MailStName", "MailStType", "MailStPost", "MailUnitType", "MailUnitNumber", "MailCity", "MailSta", "MailZip5", "MailZip4", "MailSortCodeRoute", "MailDeliveryPt", "MailDeliveryPtChkDigit", "MailLineOfTravel", "MailLineOfTravelOrder", "MailDPVStatus", "MADR_LastCleanse", "MADR_LastCOA", "AreaCode", "TelephoneNUm", "TelSourceCode", "TelMatchLevel", "TelReliability", "FTC_DoNotCall", "PhoneAppendDate", "VH12G", "VH12P", "VH12PP", "VH11G", "VH11P", "VH10G", "VH10P", "VH09G", "VH09P", "VH08G", "VH08P", "VH08PP", "VH07G", "VH07P", "VH06G", "VH06P", "VH05G", "VH05P", "VH04G", "VH04P", "VH04PP", "VH03G", "VH03P", "VH02G", "VH02P", "MT10_Party", "MT10_GenericBallot", "MT10_Turnout", "MT10_ObamaDisapproval", "MT10_Jobs", "MT10_Healthcare", "MT10_SoCo", "PG01", "PG02", "PG03", "PG04", "PG05", "PG06", "PG07", "PG08", "PG09", "PG10", "PG11", "PG12", "PG13", "PG14", "PG15", "PG16", "PG17", "PG18", "PG19", "PG20", "PG21", "PG22", "PG23", "PG24", "PG25", "PG26", "PG27", "PG28", "PG29", "PG30", "PG31", "PG32", "PG33", "PG34", "PG35", "PG36", "PG37", "PG38", "PG39"

The database consists of the first and last names of the voters along with the voter’s date of birth, home and mailing addresses, phone number, registered party, self-reported racial demographic, voter registration status, and even whether they are on the federal “Do Not Call” list.

There was a smaller folder for the 2016 election in the database, but they contain CSV files for Ohio and Florida, unlike the 2008 and 2012 folders.

In the 50 GB file titled “DRA Post-Elect 2016 All Scores 1-12-17.yxdb,” each potential voter is scored with a decimal fraction between zero and one across forty-six columns. The data included in the files are related to Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2017.

According to a statement by UpGuard, between January 2015 and November 2016, the RNC paid TargetPoint $4.2 million for data services, and gave Causeway around $500,000 in that time, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Deep Root, acting as Needle Drop, was paid $983,000 by the RNC.