Back in June this year, reporters reported of how one hacker had managed to get into the Louisiana database and gotten away with a quarter million drivers license information on the underground market. Now, another security researcher has discovered a new publicly available database which was named the lavoter database and it contains data of 2.9 million Louisiana people.
Mackeeper’s security researcher, Chris Vickery, discovered the database which was being hosted on Google’s own Cloud IP. The database had about 2.9 million records, with an exact number of 2,919,651. This shows that the voter database online is the entire voting capacity of the Louisiana state.
After scanning the database, Vickery noted that the database he had seen contained some information which included full names, email addresses, several details of gender and race, voter status of the individuals, their registration date and numbers, the political party code, the phone numbers of the voters, their details about how they voted last time and the voting history since they started doing so.
The security researcher also managed to find another database which was hosted on the same server which was written as ladps. The database contained about 6,978,508 records of record people. Vickery said he was not sure about the ladps file but said his first guess was that it was for the Department of Public Safety.
Even without knowing the owner of the database, Vickery still went on to scan the database and be found the full names, the race and gender details, date of birth, addresses, the details about the height, weight, residence parish code, the social security numbers of the people and their driving license numbers were also included.
The two databases have been secured right now by the security researcher. He however was shocked in his attempts to secure the legal means to protect the data when he noticed that the state of Louisiana actually sells the voting rights to the highest bidder. Vickery wrote explaining the situation that when he and his company had tried to follow the legal route and get a legal requirement to get protection of the database, they were shocked to see that the database is actually open to anyone who wishes to pay for it.
One chilly fact is that you don’t even need to state what you are going to use the information for. The Louisiana state board gives you options of how to buy the data, whether you want past or present information, separation by demographics and any other choices you may make. The state sells one name for $0.01, according to Vickery.
This is not the first time that Vickery has noticed voter data on the listings which are found on the internet. In the past he noticed 191 million US voter registration records online. He has also discovered the entire voter database for Mexico online available for public use. Clearly, cyber infrastructure in the US is under threat and it’s unclear at the moment how something like this happened. Most recently, the US officials have been blaming Russian proxies for attacks on the presidential campaign computer networks.
