(Image source from: Millions of California voters claimed potential data leak)

The State election officials of California are investigating into the claim of Voters that, their personal information is leaked on the internet.

Alex Padilla, California Secretary of State said that, media reports that were circulated on Monday said that the personal information of around 191 million voters across the state had been posted online “in an insecure manner by an unknown third party”. The office of California Secretary is verifying such media reports, he added.

Chris Vickery, a Security researcher told Los Angeles Times,  during a telephonic interview, that he had posted the database on website on December 20. The data includes only names, address, dates of birth  and also the information about, whether or not, the voters had casted votes in the 2000 election, he added.

Vickery said, “When you see these types of databases, sometimes there are a lot of entries, so seeing a large amount of numbers was not that surprising.”

But, in between, he noticed some alteration in the data what he has posted. He finds that, the lines of the information were modified and the number of entries for both Texas and California was considerably expanded.

“When I looked at Texas and saw my name there, that’s when it really struck me,”  Vickery added.

Still, it is unclear, who modified and posted  the data publicly. The posted data were last updated in 2014, he said. The database contains the information of about 17.8 million California’s voters. However, in Februrary 2015, there were around 17.7 million registered voters in the state of California.

Vickery said, “There may not be very many people driving down that road, but anyone can drive to it and access those files. The company didn’t put up any walls, didn’t put up any doors, and a person driving down the road could just happen to get lucky and see it,” he added.

Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation,  said that, “This is one of the best-kept secrets of American politics, that all this data is being collected.  It’s the kind of sausage-making of the political system that is integral to so many campaigns,  but hidden mostly from voters,” she added.

“All this behind-the-scene profiling of voters makes a lot of people uncomfortable and once they get a whiff of it, people may say they don’t want to be a part of it,” she said.
The information is available to anyone, including terrorists and scammers,  later she added.

Nandini