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93.4m Mexican Voter Details Posted as Publicly Accessible


Chris Vickery, Researcher from MacKeeper reports that he found a database which was publicly accessible from one AWS server, and so unprotected while consisting of 93.4m voter details of the Mexican population. The details comprise voters' names, birth dates, occupations, postal addresses, registration IDs for voting besides other information.

To notify about the breach, Chris Vickery, America-based computer security investigator contacted the Mexican officials. Vickery, who's employed at Kromtech, and develops anti-virus software for MacKeeper, detected the voter information on 14th April on a cloud server for Amazon Web Services (AWS). He eventually managed to contact the authorities belonging to INE, who then cleared the server off the database.

In the meantime, Elections Commissioner of Mexico substantiated authenticity of the database, which has been made secure. However, the problem causing annoyance is what other source had acquired admission into the sensitive information, as also what source posted it onto an American Amazon cloud system.

Towards the end of 2015, Vickery had reported unearthing one improperly configured database having 191m American voters' details. Nonetheless, differently from within USA where a greater part of such data is already accessible to the public, Mexican law solely lets voter database to be used for authentication, while the data mustn't be freely viewable.

Following the incident, INE stated that the database consisted of one voters' list accumulated during February 2015. A criminal grievance has been filed even as the organization is conducting an investigation, however, clues are absent to substantiate that an unauthorized source obtained the information because of a security hack.

Officials from INE said to DataBreaches.net that political parties had been provided with the data and they were presently making efforts for locating the person(s) behind the incident. It is not clear whether anyone else besides Vickery accessed the server and took down the details, nevertheless, INE hopes Amazon would provide the answers to the problems. Securityweek.com posted this online dated April 25, 2016.

Meanwhile according to INE, it has sought prosecution of the entity that would be found accountable towards posting the registered voter details of Mexican people onto the AWS server.

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