200M Voter Records Compromised

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The data exposure provides insight into the inner workings of the Republican National Committee***8217;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***8217;s loss in 2012. Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint, and Data Trust***8212;all Republican data firms***8212;were among the RNC-hired outfits working as the core of the Trump campaign***8217;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***8212;last updated around the January 2017 presidential inauguration***8212;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. UpGuard***8217;s discovery ***8212; of perhaps the largest known exposure of voter information in history***8212;is corroborated by technical evidence, as well as by the public statements of the responsible firms and political staffers.

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Within ***8220;data_trust***8221; are two massive stores of personal information collectively representing up to 198 million potential voters. Consisting primarily of two file repositories, a 256 GB folder for the 2008 presidential election and a 233 GB folder for 2012, each containing fifty-one files - one for every state, as well as the District of Columbia. Each file, formatted as a comma separated value (.csv), lists an internal, 32-character alphanumeric ***8220;RNC ID***8221;***8212;such as, for example, 530C2598-6EF4-4A56-9A7X-2FCA466FX2E2***8212;used to uniquely identify every potential voter in the database. These RNC IDS uniquely link disparate data sets together, combining 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.

Who cares, we have nothing to hide. Right guys?!

200M Voter Records Compromised