REUTERS/Steve Marcus
A cache of nearly 600,000 American voter records have been published online, researchers from the Kromtech Security Research Center discovered. The records had been compiled by a data-aggregating firm Targetsmart, which sells voter information to political campaigns. The records are usually kept private, but 593,328 of those records (believed to be the records of every registered voter in Alaska) were listed on a website that anyone could access without a password, the Kromtech researchers found. The records, which have since been pulled offline, contained personal information including an individual's household income, the issues they could be lobbied on, and the age ranges of their children. "We've learned that Equals3, an [artificial intelligence] software company based in Minnesota, appears to have failed to secure some of their data and some data they license from TargetSmart, and that a database of approximately 593,000 Alaska voters appears to have been inadvertently exposed," said Tom Bonier, Targetsmart chief executive told ZDNet.