Security researcher Chris Vickery came across an online database, hosted on a Google Cloud server, containing 154 million US voter records.
It emerged that the poorly-secured database belonged to an unnamed client of data brokerage firm L2. The client has blamed hackers for leaving the database accessible from the outside world, without even the simplest password.
The Daily Dot asks an important question:
Why does this keep happening, and what is our government doing about it? The answer to the former is linked to the answer to the latter: Our government is currently doing little to nothing, so why should entities make more effort to secure our information?
Attempts to regulate voter registration list dissemination are unlikely to succeed because political organizations and fund-raising organizations rely upon them, and their lobby makes mincemeat of any privacy lobbying efforts. No federal agency is enforcing data security in political organizations or non-profits, and so far, neither are state attorneys general.
But while Americans quickly shrug and go back to our daily lives after a bit of outraged protesting online, citizens of other countries seem to take this all much more seriously.
It really is scandalous that when personal information like this is being collected by organisations it is being protected so shoddily.
Learn more at The Daily Dot.
nothing to see here folks, move along.