Russian hackers leak personal data of nearly every voter in Michigan, plus a million more

Russian hackers have leaked the personal data of nearly every voter in Michigan (7.6 million of the state’s 7.8 million voters), as well as the information of another million voters in Arkansas, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Florida, according to the newspaper Kommersant. The data recently appeared on a Darknet forum, posted by a user nicknamed “Gorka9.” The information was current as of March 2020 and a source at the security firm “InfoWatch” confirmed to Kommersant that the data is authentic.

For each American voter targeted in the leak, the following information is now available: full name, date of birth, sex, date of registration, home address, zip code, email address, voter ID number, and polling station number.

According to Kommersant, the voter data was released online for free, but the newspaper says forum members apparently used the U.S. government’s own “Rewards for Justice” program to earn money on the stolen information by reporting the election interference to the State Department. One forum member told the newspaper that he received $4,000 for sharing a hyperlink with U.S. officials to the leaked database of Connecticut voters.

Washington has offered as much as $10 million “for information leading to the identification or location of any person who works with or for a foreign government for the purpose of interfering with U.S. elections through certain illegal cyber activities.”

Vladimir Dryukov, the director of the “Rostelecom-Solar” cybersecurity company, told Kommersant that the hackers responsible for stealing the voter data likely earned money on the information by selling it to scammers before releasing it online for free. Andrey Arsentiev, the head of analytics and special projects at InfoWatch, told the newspaper that such leaks can also serve political purposes and theoretically be used to determine voter preferences, influence voter choices, and incite people to protest.

At the time of this writing, the U.S. government has not commented on the hacked voter information.

Alex Stamos, a cybersecurity expert and adjunct professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute, cautions against “jumping at shadows” in response to Kommersant‘s report. “This information is generally publicand could have been taken from hundreds of customers of voter information brokers,” he explained on Twitter, adding, “Darkweb forums, especially ones in Russian, are chock full of free and paid data dumps like this with no immediate use.”

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/0...us-a-million-more-voters-in-four-other-states

 

...and the FEC still doesn’t have a quorum.