The treasure trove of information collected from American voters was discovered in early June by the Cyber Risk Team at cyber resilience company UpGuard. The server resided in Amazon’s Web Services S3 cloud network and hosted data accessible by typing “dra-dw” into the address bar to access the server’s subdomain. Short for Deep Root Analytics Data Warehouse, the “data warehouse” term is commonly used by businesses when storing loads of data for complex analytics purposes.
Along with the voter data, UpGuard’s team discovered directories with names matching “high-powered and influential” Republican political organizations. The firm also stumbled across 24 terabytes of data blocked from public access. Ultimately, Deep Root Analytics stored enough data on its publicly accessed server to generate around 10 billion pages of text, the firm said on Monday.
“Deep Root Analytics confirmed they owned and operated the dra-dw bucket, which was subsequently secured against public access the night of June 14, shortly after [Risk Analyst Chris] Vickery notified federal authorities,” UpGuard added.
So why was all of this sensitive data left unchecked and accessible? In a statement provided by DRA, a change was made in the settings for accessing the server sometime after June 1, exposing the sensitive information. Now, the company is accepting full responsibility, and conducting a full investigation alongside cyber security firm Stroz Friedberg.
“The data that was accessed was, to the best of our knowledge, proprietary information as well as voter data that is publicly available and readily provided by state government offices,” the company stated. “Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) hired analytic firms to better understand voters and alter President Donald Trump’s political run to win the election. Deep Root Analytics created and maintained the nationwide database while Data Trust, TargetPoint Consulting, and Causeway Solutions collected and dumped data into the online repository. According to UpGuard, it was within the “data_trust” folder that Vickery discovered the stored voter information.
Inside this directory was a folder playing host to 256 GB of data from the 2008 presidential election, and another folder containing 233 GB of data from the 2012 election. Both folders contained 51 files — one for each state along with Washington D.C. — and each file contained 32-character alphanumeric numbers assigned to every voter within that state, aka RNC IDs.
Thus, by using one of the RNC IDs, the Republican Party could string data dumps together to pull out a large batch of data tied to a single voter. In addition to the information stated above, the GOP could also tell if the voter was on the federal “Do Not Call” list, gather all mailing addresses, see their self-reported racial demographic, longitude/latitude coordinates, and so on.
The RNC reportedly paid TargetPoint Consulting $4.2 million for “data services” between January 2015 and November 2016. During that time, Causeway received around $500,000 and Deep Root (under the Needle Drop name) received $983,000.
Vickery’s latest discovery follows a leak he found in April 2016 regarding 93.4 million Mexican citizens. Prior to that, he was hired by Mac anti-virus software firm MacKeeper after discovering that the company’s database was open to anyone online.
