Chicago Registered Voter Information Breached
...sensitive voter information such as driver's license numbers, cell phone numbers, emails, dates of birth and more was revealed
Chicago, Illinois (PRWEB) November 13, 2012
The security breach was discovered when Cyber Security and Computer Forensics firm, Forensicon’s President, Lee Neubecker, was attempting to access the Chicago Board of Elections website chicagoelections.com.
"I wanted to compare voting patterns between Cleveland, Ohio’s Ward 5 that reported 99% voting rates for President Obama in certain precincts. When I visited the Chicago Board of Election’s website, chicagoelections.com, to compare election returns of demographically similar wards and precincts in Chicago, I discovered the site would not load. I then tried browsing ftp.chicagoelections.com. The ftp port on chicagoelections.com did not require any authentication, but revealed the voter registration database username and password, among countless other data that should not be accessible to the public. A treasure trove of sensitive voter information such as driver’s license numbers, cell phone numbers, emails, dates of birth and more was revealed," reported Neubecker.
Forensicon analysts have begun to review some of the compromised data in an attempt to quantify the scope of the information breached and inform the public. One unencrypted spreadsheet alone “fulldump.xls” last modified 11/6/2012 7:10AM contained sensitive information relating to over 1,200 individuals, including names, addresses, full driver’s license numbers, and the last 4 digits of their social security number. This is a massive security breach totaling approximately 5 Gigabytes of website code, registered voter information, election judge information, and much more.
See more updates including video of the security breach at http://www.forensicon.com/chicago-elections-website-security-breach/