35 Million 2018 US Voter Records For Sale
Just weeks before the midterms, voter information from 19 states has turned up on the Dark Web. Up to 35 million voter records have been found up for sale on a popular hacking forum from 19 states, researchers discovered.
Researchers at Anomali Labs and Intel 471 said that they discovered Dark Web communications offering a large quantity of voter databases for sale, including valuable personally identifiable information and voter history.
This represents the first indication of 2018 voter registration data for sale on a hacking forum, said the researchers. The discovery comes weeks before the US November mid-term elections.
“With the November 2018 midterm elections only four weeks away, the availability and currency of the voter records, if combined with other breached data, could be used by malicious actors to disrupt the electoral process or pursue large-scale identity theft,” researchers at Anomali Labs said in a Monday post.
“Given the illicit vendor claims of weekly updates of voter records and their high reputation on the hacker forum, we assess with moderate confidence that he or she may have persistent database access and/or contact with government officials from each state.”
Researchers did not post what the name of the hacking forum was, or the timeline of the sales.
The disclosure affects 19 states and includes 23 million records for just three of the 19 states, researchers said. Impacted states include: Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
No record counts were provided for the remaining 16 states, but they did include prices for each state. Each voter list ranges from $150 to $12,500, depending on the state, the research team said. These prices could be related to the number of voter records per database.
The records contain voter data including full name, phone numbers, physical addresses, voting history, and other unspecified voting data.
“We estimate that the entire contents of the disclosure could exceed 35 million records,” the research team said.
“Researchers have reviewed a sample of the database records and determined the data to be valid with a high degree of confidence.”
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