A contractor used by the Republican National Committee exposed the data of 198 million Americans, the largest voter data leak of its kind, according to the cybersecurity firm UpGuard.
Data — name, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers, ethnicity, religion — was stored on a publicly available cloud server owned by Deep Root Analytics, UpGuard reported.
Two other Republican contractors, Data Trust and TargetPoint Consulting, in addition to DRA, also compiled the data, UpGuard reported.
UpGuard reported that spreadsheets containing billions of data points on three out of five Americans also was exposed in the database for an unknown period of time.
UpGuard analyst Chris Vickery discovered the breach on June 12 and notified federal authorities. The information was finally secured June 14, UpGuard reported.
"That such an enormous national database could be created and hosted online, missing even the simplest of protections against the data being publicly accessible, is troubling," UpGuard's Dan O'Sullivan wrote.
"The ability to collect such information and store it insecurely further calls into question the responsibilities owed by private corporations and political campaigns to those citizens targeted by increasingly high-powered data analytics operations."
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