Nox & Friends: Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee.
The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.
The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server.
Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.
Political biases exposed
The huge cache of data was discovered last week by Chris Vickery, a cyber-risk analyst with security firm UpGuard. The information seems to have been collected from a wide range of sources – from posts on controversial banned threads on the social network Reddit, to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party.
The information was stored in spreadsheets uploaded to a server owned by Deep Root Analytics. It had last been updated in January when President Donald Trump was inaugurated and had been online for an unknown period of time.
“We take full responsibility for this situation. Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked,” Deep Root Analytics’ founder Alex Lundry told technology website Gizmodo.
“Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.” read more
“Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked,”
Completing the sentance, “but then no one would need to hack into information we made freely available so what I just said is mendacious misleading bullshit.”
And they wonder why I refuse to cooperate with the US Census Bureau on the American Community Survey.
Who needs the Russians when data aggregators are this sloppy?
We are getting barraged with texts from the Ossoff campaign, the gist of which is:
“You have a right to a secret ballot. We can’t know how you vote. But we can find out if you voted.”
Now I guess they can find out how we voted. Thanks, derp state RNC.
@Boyd – Exactly, his statement was about as extremely disingenuous as you can get. It’s like saying “Nobody stole our trade secrets” when you’ve chalked them on the sidewalk in front of your door.
I would like to know if my info was a part of this. Anybody know how to find out?
@joe6
Try unscrewme.com. Just kidding.
PHenry, unscrewme.com could be the answer to a lot of questions. For example, I just sent my girlfriend a text that was meant for someone else, how can I get it back before she reads it?
joe6pak JUNE 20, 2017 AT 11:39 AM
I would like to know if my info was a part of this. Anybody know how to find out?
Joe; I don’t know the answer to that but I get these mailers from the RNC that say “here is your special id number.” They’re opinion surveys and that may be one source of their info. I gave money once to them to defeat the big O and they’ve been hounding me ever since.
@joe–sorry you may need to find a new girlfriend. if you sent a text by mistake it’s to late. good luck LOL… 🙁
I’ve seen this kind of carelessness dozens of times in my career. A lot of people who are good at analyzing data are complete fucking morons when it comes to securing data. I’ve had to chew out imbeciles like this on multiple occasions in my career. They’re the same kind of assholes who copy an entire database to their own personal work area because they want a copy all for themselves (for no other reason than that, none.), completely unnecessarily, and filling up the entire disk on a shared work space, fucking up everyone’s workday in the process. They’re high functioning fucktards. And they never learn. I have to strip all our data of personally identifiable information because our data scientists are too fucking stupid and careless not to let names and address leak out in their reports.
Newsflash…
Lucifer has the goods on EVERYONE down here. However, it’s not “on the Cloud”…it’s “in the Hole” 👿
“Would you be willing to take a survey?”
No! And F U.
I always take their surveys, I never give a truthful answer. Often times they ask for my wife, I’ll say that’s me, then tell them I’m feeling kind of feminine today. Some hang up, but most just keep going like it was an acceptable answer.
Accidentally my ass.
Was the firm secretly owned by Soros?
btw, the guy who created this list and left it on the net for all to see? Word has it he no longer works for that company, as he has a job as the Personnel Director for the Trump Administration. Anyone else hear that?