191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

http://www.databreaches.net/191-million-voters-personal-info-exposed-by-misconfigured-database/

by rmxt • 11 years ago

307 99 11 years ago

a2tech• 11 years ago

Whats amazing is that there seems to be no way to contact anyone to take down this database-its just sitting there happily serving up data to anyone that asks. No contact info, no way to track down the owners.

Almost makes you think knocking it offline would be worthwhile just so someone will take a look at it.

dvcc• 11 years ago

Using census info for age distributions, this most likely amounts to every registered voter.

The site also seems to be having a rough time with the traffic. Here is the cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXSmNL6...

Afforess• 11 years ago

As far as I can tell, the only "breach" here is revealing what candidates or parties voters chose. The voter registries are public in nearly all states. I've used public voter registries to look up addresses, even when I only had a name. Information such as a personal address, phone number, etc have always been trivial to look up.

krisdol2• 11 years ago

I don't disagree with the general notion of your comment, but in

As far as I can tell, the only "breach" here is revealing what candidates or parties voters chose

Why put "breach" in double-quotes? That's a very serious privacy concern if voters did not want this information to be public.

JadeNB5• 11 years ago

Why put "breach" in double-quotes? That's a very serious privacy concern if voters did not want this information to be public.

I think that this is a very important point. It doesn't matter how important it is to you that my information is public; the seriousness of its exposure depends on how important it is to me. (I am using 'you' and 'me' here not to argue with you specifically—in fact I agree with you!—but rather as generic pronouns.)

thomasrossi• 11 years ago

When the vote they implicitly consent for that data to be public. The problem is that this db is serving the data to users who are not gong to the proper office to ask for them.

dfc• 11 years ago

  > revealing what candidates or parties voters chose

This did not happen.

JadeNB5• 11 years ago

> revealing what candidates or parties voters chose
This did not happen.

The list of fields at http://www.databreaches.net/wp-content/uploads/DataFields.jp... does include 'party', although I suppose that information is only as confidential as the voter registration anyway.

EDIT: The replies indicate that my last sentence was unclear. Contrary to what it seemed to say, it meant that, since the voter registration isn't confidential, neither is the party information (except that sometimes the voter registration is confidential, as discussed in the article and my 'uncle' comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10801570 )). Maybe I should have phrased it, equivalently but more clearly, as "that information is as public as the voter registration anyway".

The point of my comment was just that it is not true that "voters' parties weren't revealed", which I took to be part of dfc's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10801543 ).

natch• 11 years ago

You have no way to know this, unless you are the researcher or have access to the full list of fields somehow.

The list of fields shown is not complete, as they clearly state. They may have a reason known only to them, don't ask me what it is, for holding back information on fields they did not show.

pjc50• 11 years ago

revealing what candidates or parties voters chose

.. thereby destroying the integrity of the secret ballot, enabling vote-selling, intimidation, etc.

stan_rogers• 11 years ago

It's just a consequence of the ridiculous party affiliation declaration of voter registration in the USA. It may or may not have anything at all to do with how a person actually votes, and is not a record of how people have ever voted (except coincidentally, if they both registered, say, as a Republican and voted for all Republican candidates). Elsewhere, party membership/affiliation is completely separate from voter registration; participation in the candidate selection process, etc., is governed internally by the party and its membership.

JadeNB5• 11 years ago

The voter registries are public in nearly all states.

The article specifically mentions this:

While the majority of states make their voter registration lists available as a matter of public record and do not restrict use, some states restrict use. For example, South Dakota requires the requestor of voter registration data to sign a statement …. In California, information on voter registration cards is considered confidential, and subject to many restrictions to access and use …. And in Hawaii, voter registration information may only be used for elections and by the government.

It is implied that the victims include voters from these three states (and explicitly stated that they include voters from California), so it is a genuine data breach in that sense.

As far as I can tell, the only "breach" here is revealing what candidates or parties voters chose.

Also, as other commenters have mentioned, the list of fields at http://www.databreaches.net/wp-content/uploads/DataFields.jp... does include your party (which I think is information as public as the voting record anyway), but does not seem to include your specific vote.

eli9• 11 years ago

It does not have candidates voted for (how could it?) Just party registration, which is public. All of the data in this database appears to already be public records.

kazazes4• 11 years ago

That's the question: why are the "primary_2000" and "general_2000" fields redacted strings? http://www.databreaches.net/wp-content/uploads/DataFields.jp...

afarrell• 11 years ago

I've used public voter registries to look up addresses, even when I had only a name

This is why Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (and presumably other victims of stalking or DV) does not vote.

sixothree2• 11 years ago

It also seems to include data on when they have voted. Which year and primary versus general. I'm sure this is going to be valuable to someone.

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

revealing what candidates or parties voters chose

Isn't this supposed to be anonymous? Is it just the affiliation declared when registering for voting, or the actual vote itself?

jwcrux• 11 years ago

Seeing the "_id" : ObjectId() fields indicates to me that this is likely a mongodb instance that was available to everyone.

There's been a lot of talk about these recently[1] that I'm surprised this didn't come up sooner.

[1] https://blog.shodan.io/its-still-the-data-stupid/

xPaw• 11 years ago

Yeah, the screenshot is using MongoVUE.

cjoh• 11 years ago

While it's poor form to have a leaky database, this information is largely public and dirt cheap. You can buy a whole state's worth of data for a couple hundred bucks or a few cents a name. That includes whether or not you're registered to vote in any specific primary.

Doesn't look like who you voted for is disclosed -- I'm not sure that this data even exists. I suspect in most states, you go in to vote, your name is crossed off a list, you're assigned a hash, and that hash votes, and there's no database of "John Smith voted for Jane Doe."

eternalban• 11 years ago

Doesn't DieBold determine who voted for whom? /s

golergka4• 11 years ago

I suspect in most states, you go in to vote, your name is crossed off a list, you're assigned a hash

I don't know about US, but I once knew a programmer who worked on russian voting system.

I honestly don't think that he was qualified enough to know what "hash" is.

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

Given that it's a Russian voting system, I'm not sure that this is unintentional.

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

You can buy a whole state's worth of data for a couple hundred bucks or a few cents a name.

Where is this data sold?

dublinben• 11 years ago

The Secretary of State's Office in each state is usually responsible for maintaining and selling copies of this information.

eli9• 11 years ago

https://elections.nationbuilder.com

Among many others.

The data itself is mostly free public records, but it's worth paying to get all 50 states in one place

mikestew• 11 years ago

Secretary of State's office for a particular state. WA charges some trivial amount for the trouble.

There are companies that add a bit of value by collecting the data and spiffing up the formatting a bit, then burning it to a CD/DVD for you. When I ran for city council of Redmond, WA, I went 15 minutes down the road to a place in Bellevue and just picked up the CD. It gives name, address, and whether or not one voted in each of the last X elections. SELECT * FROM voters WHERE "voter voted in 50% of elections" to get bang for the walking-door-to-door buck, throw that into MapPoint (tells you how long ago it was), and print out the walking sheets.

marklyon• 11 years ago

In my home state, your registration is printed in a poll book. It has a line number. As you come in to vote, you sign a log and the poll worker marks that you voted. The way they used to mark that you voted was by writing the sequential sign-in line number you signed in on. So, signature 73 would match up to James Smith.

We then implemented electronic voting machines with voter-verifiable paper tapes that allow to you see your votes and could, if absolutely necessary, be used to do a manual recount using paper records. These tapes were on the same type of paper used for other receipts, but were fed from one reel to another and stored in a locked box on the machine.

During the first election these machines were used, I went with another poll watcher to the precinct where a politician who was so set on how secure and wonderful the machines were and kept my own log - which of the five machines people used as they signed in.

So, at the end, I had my log (line 73 to machine 5, line 74 to machine 1, etc), the nice sequential sign-in sheet that matched easily to the easy-to-read printed poll book, and the paper tapes (required to be open to inspection).

We were able to match votes to people for all but seven of the votes (the last seven, actually, and we had a good idea who matched with which). The politician flipped his shit when I was able to demonstrably prove he voted for someone other than his party's candidate for governor.

The poll procedures were changed the next election cycle. The paper tapes were not allowed to be produced and the poll workers used a tick mark instead of a number in the poll books. The machines remain in use.

deathhand• 11 years ago

The politician flipped his shit when I was able to demonstrably prove he voted for someone other than his party's candidate for governor. The poll procedures were changed the next election cycle. The paper tapes were not allowed to be produced and the poll workers used a tick mark instead of a number in the poll books. The machines remain in use.

So you are the person that killed democracy? Given that voting is a "trade secret" and the code will never be inspected do you think the abolishment of a paper trail is a good idea?

cbsmith2• 11 years ago

"Could it be one of their non-hosted clients leaking the database? Maybe. Could it be that someone hacked one of their clients and stored a copy of the database at this IP address? Maybe. Could it be that an employee of a client decided to make themselves a copy for their own purposes? Maybe. The possibilities are numerous. We really don’t know and DataBreaches.net declines to speculate."

Umm... you just speculated.

NittLion78• 11 years ago

They refuse to speculate if one of the speculations is superior to other speculations. Thus, if all speculations are still on the board to be further speculated upon, one cannot speculate further.

My head hurts.

cbsmith2• 11 years ago

You win the rationalization of the day award: two aspirins. ;-)

eli9• 11 years ago

This is public voter data that anyone can get from their county office or secretary of state's office. It's not being "exposed" because voter files and party registrations were never secret.

rmxt• 11 years ago

As the article notes, a good portion of the information is already public like you've said. However, as I see it, there are two types of "exposure" at play here. I took the "exposure" in the headline to mean "a publicly accessible database is serving up information that the owner might not have intended to reveal," rather than "sensitive personal/private information has become public." In my opinion, the "exposure" being described does not have to be the latter type to be unsettling or worthy of mention.

eli9• 11 years ago

Pretty sure it is 100% already public. And not that hard to access. See e.g. https://elections.nationbuilder.com

sixothree2• 11 years ago

Is it public information in which elections a person votes?

eli9• 11 years ago

Yes.

There have actually been some interesting social science experiments to shame people into voting more often by using their turnout record http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/30/inter...

btilly• 11 years ago

The data is not a well-kept secret, but there are restrictions on its use, and for some locations criminal laws about misuse. See http://nationbuilder.com/voterdata for state by state rules.

Note in particular, "Placing on the internet so anyone can find out where anyone else lives" is not exactly an approved use in locations like California and Hawaii. Which is why there are going to be consequences once the database owner is tracked down.

specialist3• 11 years ago

Further, some records may never be public, depending on local rules. Witness protection, victims of domestic violence, judges, etc.

NN88• 11 years ago

But eliminating the jumps you go through to get that info isn't a good thing either

jes2• 11 years ago

Are you saying that accessing public data should be possible, but require a willingness to jump through hoops?

What's your thinking behind that?

specialist3• 11 years ago

Rant: The state run VRDB's are a mess.

HAVA improved the situation, but 50+ separate systems leads to data quality issues. Which then trigger alarms. False positives are "voter fraud". False negatives are "caging" and "purging".

Made worse by the requirement that only eligible (active & inactive) voters appear in each database. Versus a master list of everyone with an eligibility flag, backed by an audit log.

The optimal solution is automatic, universal voter registration, maintained by each jurisdiction and hosted by the feds (perhaps http://eac.gov). Which is exactly what both parties are doing in-house. Then we can put a stop to the recurring food fight every election cycle.

Thanks for listening. My work on this issue has made me grumpy.

sethbannon• 11 years ago

What sort of work have you done?

wwweMergescom3• 11 years ago

Not really true, see: http://www.emerges.com/assets/images/docs/Restricted-State-V...

jstalin2• 11 years ago

Earlier this year I spent $25 for a FOIA request for my state's entire voter database. This isn't exactly private information.

whoopdedo• 11 years ago

What benefit does revealing registrations provide? How would the public interest be harmed by shielding names, addresses, and phone numbers from disclosure?

A lot of comments here saying "so what it's public record." But not a lot of asking if it should be. Something being the status quo doesn't make it right.

kristofferR• 11 years ago

It seems like this is a MongoDB database.

Scanning the US IP ranges for Linux hosts (as mentioned in the article) with port 27017 open with ZMap and then running a script that connects to the open database and saves the size of the database in a file would be a good place to start for those who want to find it.

hendzen2• 11 years ago

Also a good way to go to jail. Please think long and hard before accessing random computers on the internet. The fact that they are unprotected is unfortunate but irrelevant.

r0m4n02• 11 years ago

While you might appear to be overly cautious, I'm going to agree with you. Better to not be wrapped up in the witch hunt especially once we know authorities are investigating

netcraft• 11 years ago

im interested in the legality argument against this - if it is illegal how do sites like this operate?

https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A27017+country%3AUS...

or even https://scans.io/ which uses something like https://zmap.io/

Not saying you're wrong, wondering where the line is if there is one.

jstalin2• 11 years ago

Undoubtedly, the torrent will be available in a matter of hours. Let someone else do the dirty work.

crumpetCohesion• 11 years ago

Haven't found one yet. Have you?

r0m4n02• 11 years ago

I own a few services that rely on voterfile data we acquire from many sources and I am aware of quite a few others (so I feel like I need to chime in here haha). I suppose sources aren't going to disclose the actual resource or IP address until law enforcement tracks them down? I haven't been able to find any reports of anything specific.

It may not be Nation Builder per se but it could be one of their many integration points maintained by third parties:

http://nationbuilder.com/apps

kazazes4• 11 years ago

A well crafted shodan.io search given the already public information (approximate size, in the US, no password, etc.) should give you a good start. It's already been found once.

exhilaration4• 11 years ago

So here's a starting point: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A27017+country%3AUS...

I'm not sure how to search by database size though. But I'd estimate that 190 million voter records, at 1 kb each, would be a little under 2 GB if my math is right.

AlexCoventry• 11 years ago

So where is the database?

If there's any legal or ethical problem with doing this using the Ohio Voter Registration files, I would like to know. I recently made an interface to it[1] to use when gathering ballot access petition signatures for Bernie Sanders in Ohio[2]. It's freely downloadable data, though[3], and the Board of Elections officials I shared it with weren't aghast at the idea.

[1] http://gobernie.net/ Source code: https://github.com/coventry/voter_lookup

[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/929112173802716/

[3] http://www2.sos.state.oh.us/pls/voter/f?p=111:1:0::NO:RP:P1_...

occsceo• 11 years ago

My team has these same questions, we are working on a unified voter db. Care to collab on thoughts? looks like thehill just picked up on this. my username at gmail

wwweMergescom3• 11 years ago

Be pleased to look for the source with you emerges.com@gmail.com

ryanlol• 11 years ago

Not sure what LE is doing here unless this is operated by an org in one of the states where it's illegal to publish this data.

e.g a Florida company publishing California voter records in Florida can't possibly be committing a crime.

I don't see why FBI would get involved either, since there doesn't seem to be any federal crimes happening here.

wwweMergescom3• 11 years ago

Look at our more detailed compilation of statutes at http://www.emerges.com/assets/images/docs/Restricted-State-V.... Note NationBuilder is wrong about permissible MS data useage.

More critically, NationBuilder may erroneously be denying accountability.

“Nation Builder is under no obligation to identify customers, and once the data has been obtained, they cannot control what happens to it,”

Specifically look at the statues for MA and CA. Clearly and in writing voter list purchasers are required to get written pre-approval from the two respective states PRIOR to releasing the data. But what if NationBuilder did not sign the affidavit with the state, ie what if NationBuilder got the data from someone in the Democratic or Republican national or state parties?

If either of the two major parties released the data without getting written pre-approval from the state, then they may all be in breach of contract and liable, NationBuilder included.

DrSayre• 11 years ago

Kentucky has it where you can find your party by using your name and birthday. It also shows your home address. If you're wondering John Calipari is an Independent while Rick Pitino is a Democrat. What's interesting is that it shows Cal's address but Pinito only shows U of L. https://vrsws.sos.ky.gov/VIC/

d43594• 11 years ago

Would be interesting to validate the voting record in elections according to the DB against the outcome.

balgan• 11 years ago

We actually found a ton of this stuff couple of months ago http://blog.binaryedge.io/2015/08/10/data-technologies-and-s...

dyoon2• 11 years ago

1) this information is mostly public information, it contains information about party affiliations and participation in elections but doesn't contain details about votes. 2) it looks like the data came from nationbuilder, which spent around 2-3 years building/compiling a voter registration database that's more accessible to the public than other proprietary solutions

dyoon2• 11 years ago

http://nationbuilder.com/voter_file

191M US Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

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