Independent computer security researcher and Texas technical support specialist Chris Vickery said he uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database. The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.S. states and Washington. Vickery said he found the information while looking for information exposed on the Web in a bid to raise awareness of data leaks. He said he could not tell whether others had accessed the voter database, which took about a day to download. While voter data is typically considered public information, it would be time-consuming and expensive to gather a database of all American voters. A trove of all U.S. voter data could be valuable to criminals looking for lists of large numbers of targets for a variety of fraud schemes.
