Robocall Firm Exposes Hundreds of Thousands of US Voters' Records (bleepingcomputer.com) 28
An anonymous reader shares a report: RoboCent, a Virginia Beach-based political robocall firm, has exposed the personal details of hundreds of thousands of US voters, according to the findings of a security researcher who stumbled upon the company's database online. The researcher, Bob Diachenko of Kromtech Security, says he discovered the data using a recently launched online service called GrayhatWarfare that allows users to search publicly exposed Amazon Web Services data storage buckets. Such buckets should never be left exposed to public access, as they could hold sensitive data.
Oops our bad... (Score:1)
I'd be willing to bet that money changed hands and that the data was 'acquired' by some people who shouldn't have it when the data was 'accidently' left exposed.
Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuuuuuuoooookay. Not their voting record, just their "Personal details". IE, whatever they've told these robocallers.
It's phone-book stuff plus party and demographics. meh. I mean, it's a leak, and you know, shame on a lazy corporation and all that. But this isn't real groundbreaking. If you donate to a political candidate, that's public knowledge anyway.
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What part of "shame on a lazy corporation" didn't you read?
Three strikes! (Score:2)
So what (Score:2, Insightful)
Robocall firms are already the people you don't want to have that.
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Voter records publicly available in most states. (Score:4, Informative)
Most, if not every state provides very low cost voter records for a very small fee. They'll just send you a DVD with all the voters addresses, names, age, and voting records. It fits in a few gigabytes of zip.
There's several websites where you can lookup someones voting record online, per state. Some states only allow the information to be used for political purposes, but that's incredibly broadly defined, and mostly just to stop people putting up stalker websites.
Re: Voter records publicly available in most stat (Score:4, Informative)
Before anyone overreacts.
The voting records provided display that you showed up at the polling place or voted an absentee ballot. Not the actual votes cast.
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Actually, voter records being public has been the law since what? 2006? I can't remember. But I know I can get a copy of all voter registration data in my home state of Washington by filling out a form on Washington states secretary of states website. They'll email me a link to download it (usually a few hours later) after my request is approved.
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Yeah, and:
* IoT devices should make their hardcoded backdoor passwords harder to find
* They should run telnet on a non-standard port for extreme security
* They should make their root passwords more than six characters
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Public information (Score:3)
Voter registration information is public info available from the Secretary of State or numerous websites for a small fee like this one: http://aristotle.com/data/data... [aristotle.com]
Robocallers act irresponsibly? NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
The first rule of robocallers: You should not allow robocallers to exist.
The second rule of robocallers: If they somehow exist, you must immediately outlaw them, and enact enormous fines against any company shown to contribute to them. These fines will bypass any corporate account masking, and go directly to each individual in the company or network of companies, based on their percent ownership, and will typically be for hundreds of millions of dollars for a nationwide campaign.
The third rule of robocallers: If they are found to be protected by jurisdiction lines, you must have a bank of anti-robocallers that are only permitted to call the offending nations - they will put out anti-robocalling messages 24 hours a day, every day of the year to every phone number in that jurisdiction. Blocking these calls will be met by blocking any communications along those channels.
The zeroth rule of robocallers: Automated spam of all sorts increasingly counts as robocalls, as technology advances.
Ryan Fenton
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Fifth rule: Previous rules don't apply until a funding mechanism is identified.
Corollary to Fifth rule: Good luck with that.
Make it private (Score:2)
Soon data brokers will get in on this and set up fake campaigns just to grab the voter records from the source and sell them to the IRS scamm
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Soon?