Personal Details Of More Than 60 Per Cent Americans Leaked

Personal information of more than 198 million citizens of the United States (US) was accidentally exposed by a marketing firm that collects data for the Republican National Committee (RNC), a political panel that provides leadership for the Republican Party, making it the largest incident of leak of voters’ record in history.

Representing 60 per cent of the US population, the data revealed includes the voters' home addresses, birth dates and phone numbers besides political preferences that assist analysts predict how individual voter would react to hot topics such as gun ownership, stem cell research and abortion rights etc.

Cybersecurity firm UpGuard’s risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered this data on an Amazon's cloud hosting server. The data had been left without any protection. Anyone with an internet access could download the entire bunch as Vickery did when he discovered the leak. Vickery said that armed with this data one "could give you the home address of every person the RNC believes voted for Trump," making it one more setback for the Republicans and a security threat for the voters.

Deep Root Analytics, a contractor for RNC, had collated this data – over 1,000 gigabytes of information – and left it vulnerable on the cloud hosting server.

The leak comes about one week after Bloomberg reported that Russians had attempted to hack voting systems in 39 states during last year's presidential election.