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Personal data on 198 million voters, including analytics data that suggests who a person is likely to vote for and why, was stored on an unsecured Amazon server.
A huge trove of voter data, including personal information and voter profiling data on what's thought to be every registered US voter dating back more than a decade, has been found on an exposed and unsecured server, ZDNet has learned.
It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date.
The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics.
UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication.
This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign.
The exposed server was also found to contain gigabytes of data from TargetPoint, a conservative market research firm focused on helping candidates better understand voters' policy preferences and political actions. Some of these files, says UpGuard, contain millions of entries that appear to rate voters on the post-election likelihood of supporting a certain policy, candidate, or belief on a scale of "very unlikely" to "very likely."
This isn't the first batch of voter data found by Vickery.
Vickery, who we profiled on ZDNet earlier this year, found 87 million Mexican voter records in an exposed database in 2016.
He was also responsible for discovering several US voter databases online totaling 18 million voters, and the state of Louisiana's entire database of 2.9 million voters.
Deep Root's exposure also appears to be larger than the 191 million voter records exposed by i360, a data company, in late 2015, and another massive leak of 154 million voter records a year later.