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.
Ross Rustici, Senior Director, Intelligence Services at Cybereason:
‘This type of data exposure is far too common place. A significant number of data exposures this year have been a result of unsecured hosting. This particular exposure is reminiscent of the Deep Root Analytics incident that exposed data on roughly 60 percent of the US population. Unfortunately, as aggregated data continues to become more valuable we are only going to see an increase in these types of incidents. Ones caused not by malicious actors but human error. The harm of this particular exposure is going to be impossible to judge, but it is another data point to be evaluated in the broader discussion of privacy in the age of big data and how information is aggregated and stored.’
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