After recurrent attempts at hacking Utah voters’ database, another striking information is in the air. Close to 15 million Texas voters’ records were found exposed online.
An unprotected data file was found on a risky server which comprised of details of approximately, 14.8 million voters, according to a report. A security researcher had come across this file by accident. The 16 gigabytes (approx) file explicitly held lots of fields including the voters’ name, address, gender, the years of voting history, also covering all the types of elections the voter had voted in and personal data like race, ethnicity and phone numbers.
The researcher who stumbled upon this file was found to have an alias name, on his twitter handle, of ‘Flash Gordon’. He is known to be an active breach hunter from New Zealand.
According to a tech source, this data leakage is a major one from the political viewpoint and is not the same as other incidents of the same kind as data of the voters holds a certain significance for the parties standing in the elections. This data could be used by candidates to flip the results and that’s why it is a point of key concern.
Sam Taylor, Communication Director for the Texas Secretary of State made a statement where he said that the data is already available for anyone who is willing to pay for it, which however would not include sensitive details like social security numbers.
According to an analyst the data was prepared around the time of the presidential elections of 2016.
The owner of the server hasn’t yet been uncovered and hence the obtainability of the data isn’t sure.
