An Electronic Voting Firm Exposes 1.8M Chicagoans

https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-chicago-voters

by mcone • 9 years ago

173 63 9 years ago

danso• 9 years ago

Source blog post (and free of CNN's obnoxious autoplay video): https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-chicago-voters

As soon as I read the headline, I immediately thought "AWS misconfiguration". A few recent massive government-data breaches (by contractors) have fallen into that category:

June 2017: http://gizmodo.com/gop-data-firm-accidentally-leaks-personal...

May 2017: http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pen...

Note that all of these breach reports (including this Chicago one) come from Upguard, which seems to have a method for scanning/crawling public S3 buckets.

sctb• 9 years ago

Thanks! We've updated the link from http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/17/technology/business/chicago-..., which points to this.

ckinnan• 9 years ago

Amazon just launched a service to help scan, categorize, and protect data https://aws.amazon.com/macie/

dark_shadow2• 9 years ago

Don't you have to pay for that?

_salmon2• 9 years ago

This looks like it only works for buckets you own. Upguard is scanning everyone.

mtgx• 9 years ago

Same with Nice Systems' leak of Verizon customers' data:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/12/verizon-partner-exposes-...

_salmon2• 9 years ago

I made a quick-and-dirty tool for doing this: https://github.com/sa7mon/S3Scanner

I'll probably spend some time this weekend making things look better and improving the documentation. I made it mostly as a PoC

verytrivial• 9 years ago

So, what, now somehow a group of people impacted by this potential identity theft vector will need to rally together under some keen prosecutor to personally sue? Why aren't the vendors auto-summoned to court by the government when these breaches occur?</rhetoricalQuestion>

Hooray for the free market .. ?

chronic6h2• 9 years ago

Hooray for the free market

The free market says they don't care. I've had my identity stolen from a data breach. Could I have sued? Yes. Could I have led a class action lawsuit? Yes.

Did I? No. Why? I'm fine now and just like billions of other humans, I'm lazy and simply just don't care enough.

SamuelAdams2• 9 years ago

Isn't this considered public data anyways? Illinois (and I believe every other US state) requires that certain voter data be publicly accessible. To access it in bulk, you'll have to pay a small fee, but anyone can get this.

A misconfigured AWS instance is always an issue. I'm not trying to downplay that. Only that this data being released to the public isn't anything new - the public already had access to it.

https://www.elections.il.gov/votinginformation/computerizedv...

mcone2• 9 years ago

No. The Chicago Tribune [0] reported on the type of data exposed:

The files included names, addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of many voters' Social Security numbers, driver's license and state ID numbers for the 1.8 million who are registered to vote in Chicago.

[0] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-chicago...

SamuelAdams2• 9 years ago

So the question becomes - what types of data is available using legal channels?

samgranieri• 9 years ago

fuck. I live in Chicago.

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

Well, there's an unpleasant reminder of why knowledge-based authentication should never be based on something immutable.

How many services do all of use use that accept name/birthdate/SSN as identification? How many other services, like phone companies, claim not to but would still yield for someone who sounded earnest and knew all of that?

And what can the leak victims possibly do? TFA is great where you can get it, but it's not universal, and none of this information can be refreshed.

ransom1538• 9 years ago

Yes. One of my first jobs out of school I worked with a Standford professor Doug Rivers (@pollingpoint) that had millions of users voting records he obtained from the government for 'research' purposes. That data: your name, address, what party you are in, et al. is TOTALLY public and passed around legally to other research centers and government agencies. He had me match address information with other databases.

tbgvi• 9 years ago

Voter registration data is available for purchase, but only by registered political committees and can't be used for commercial purposes. This also doesn't include a lot of the breached data like partial SS#'s and drivers license #'s. As a Chicagoan I'm not too happy about this breach, and there has been surprisingly little coverage of it locally.

lpa22• 9 years ago

This is EXACTLY the reason I don't vote

knieveltech• 9 years ago

Choosing to abdicate your civic responsibility is certainly your right but this is easily the most bullshit rationale I've heard offered to support the choice. I'm guessing you also don't shop at Target or Amazon?

colinyoung• 9 years ago

As both a Chicagoan and (obviously) an Illinois resident, this means my voter info has been exposed twice this year alone.

Amazon sent out warning emails for owners of misconfigured boxes about 60 days ago. Why didn't the firm in question take action? I am an engineer and literally had to do that same task at work at that time. Easy as 2 clicks.

monksy2• 9 years ago

The ticket wasn't a high enough priority. Or the PO didn't want to prioritize it in the sprint.

mattnewton• 9 years ago

My guess is they were staffed with contractors to build it out and it was no ones responsibility to maintain after they left. I've seen that happen more than once..

komali2• 9 years ago

"It was in the backlog!"

sneak• 9 years ago

T-Mobile uses the last4 of the account holder's SSN as a phone support authentication string.

This is a trove.

ams61102• 9 years ago

And they're certainly not the only one. Last 4 of SSN is a very common authentication question.

unclebucknasty3• 9 years ago

Which is inane.

We have to get away from this idea of having "secret" numbers that, if simply discovered, can cause so much damage.

That includes credit card numbers, SSN, etc.

incongruity2• 9 years ago

Is there any way for one to know if their info has been exposed? I had been registered to vote in Chicago ~6+ years ago but have since moved. Knowing Chicago, I'd bet I was still on the rolls (and probably having ballots cast for me ;)

incongruity2• 9 years ago

Not sure why my original question has been down-voted. I think it's a legitimate issue – when things like this make the news, there's often an interest for potential victims to find out if they've been put at risk. Many companies go out of their way to protect their customers/users with offers of identity monitoring/credit monitoring, etc – will the city of Chicago do the same?

ams61102• 9 years ago

Cool, now let's match them up against death records and see how many of the dead really do vote in Chicago ;)

neuronexmachina• 9 years ago

The data is for registrations, not who actually voted. There's probably quite a few people who are deceased or moved who are probably still in the registration db.

dark_shadow2• 9 years ago

hahahaha

kyle-rb• 9 years ago

Recently, I got an email from AWS notifying my that one of my S3 buckets was publicly accessible (intentionally, for a static site). They really try to make sure that people can't screw this up.

rayboy1995• 9 years ago

Yes not only that, they have changed the UI so much that it explicitly confirms that you want to make this data public.

aanet• 9 years ago

Is there any way to find one's (personal) details were in the data that was exposed??

shostack2• 9 years ago

How far fetched would it be for this data to make it's way into Cambridge Analtyica-type targeting for future election advertising?

Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I have this nagging feeling in my guy that these issues are a little too coincidental.

So how can we make sure all this data isn't used to tamper with voter rolls or uploaded to FB, etc. to create Custom Audiences based on voting history and district?

adanto6840• 9 years ago

AFAIK, the latter use-case is currently done all the time. Much of the data can be obtained legally, and is public data. Political campaigns are most definitely using all the data they have on you, including public data/legally-obtainable information such as voter turnout history/registration/party affiliation, street address, etc. to do targeting advertising already.

jdmichal2• 9 years ago

I can tell you that campaigns have much of this information already, often provided directly by the state as public information. The idea that campaigns don't already "create Custom Audiences based on voting history and district" is laughable at best. Communications are often targeted in exactly this way.

Here's Florida's relevant information:

http://dos.myflorida.com/elections/for-voters/voter-registra...

"Voter registration information is public record in Florida with a few exceptions. Information such as your social security number, driver’s license number, and the source of your voter registration application cannot be released or disclosed to the public under any circumstances. Your signature can be viewed, but not copied. Other information such as your name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, and when you voted is public information."

shostack2• 9 years ago

Most of this info is public, but not who you voted for, or your email address.

shazzy• 9 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but a great video on why Electronic Voting could be a bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

I've wondered before why the UK doesn't have e-voting, and after watching it is sort of seems obvious. With traditional voting, it can easily be changed on a small scale, but is very hard to do in a meaningful way. Whilst with e-voting, its almost just as much effort to change on a small scale as a bigger scale, with much fewer people being involved.

I particularly like the idea that the reason we use pencils is as a protection against somebody replacing pens with ones with invisible ink. Not sure if this is true though.

cozzyd• 9 years ago

I wonder if Obama's info was leaked (mine almost certainly was was :( )

An Electronic Voting Firm Exposes 1.8M Chicagoans

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