What Should (And Shouldn’t) Worry You in That Voter Data Breach
The recent news that a conservative data analytics firm left 198 million voter records unsecured online for nearly two weeks should give every American pause, particularly at a time when intelligence officials say the Russian government actively seeks to undermine American elections.
This particular breach, discovered by researcher Chris Vickery, exposed 1.1 terabytes of personal information compiled by Deep Root Analytics, a company that analyzes not just basic data like names and addresses, but also scores how particular voters feel about a range of political issues, from gun control to offshoring in the auto industry. Vickery’s discovery illustrates how poorly organizations safeguard sensitive information. But it also shows just how much information those groups have access to–and raises serious questions about what a nefarious actor could do with it. Perhaps the scariest part though is how much of this information already exists in the public domain.
