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Privacy Security United States Politics

Democratic Senate Campaign Group Exposed 6.2 Million Americans' Emails (techcrunch.com) 105

A political campaign group working to elect Democratic senators left a spreadsheet containing the email addresses of 6.2 million Americans' on an exposed server. From a report: Data breach researchers at security firm UpGuard found the data in late July, and traced the storage bucket back to a former staffer at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, an organization that seeks grassroots donations and contributions to help elect Democratic candidates to the U.S. Senate. Following the discovery, UpGuard researchers reached out to the DSCC and the storage bucket was secured within a few hours. The researchers published shared their findings exclusively with TechCrunch and published their findings. The spreadsheet was titled "EmailExcludeClinton.csv" and was found in a similarly named unprotected Amazon S3 bucket without a password. The file was uploaded in 2010 -- a year after former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom the data is believed to be named after, became secretary of state. UpGuard said the data may be of people "who had opted out or should otherwise be excludedâ from the committee's marketing.
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Democratic Senate Campaign Group Exposed 6.2 Million Americans' Emails

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  • To be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @09:46AM (#59050454)

    Leaking sensitive emails is kind of a Democrat hallmark, this is simply them being extremely on-brand.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @10:45AM (#59050792)
      that's not really a leak. Also it's likely the hack was done by Russia. [wired.com] The same was true for Hilary's emails [wikipedia.org] that went public.
  • Be a shame if we gave everyone in the world your contact information...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Welcome to the wonderful world of Big Data! Probably exported from a CRM database. The csv file format is useful for transferring data between different programs. Unless you have a really fast machine with plenty of RAM, you don't want to load it into Excel.
    • I'm interested in how it is organized and setup.
      Excel has a limit 1048576 rows. So they must have multiple sheets.
      Still it does seem as a very stupid way of distributing the data so that users can easily access it.
  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @10:08AM (#59050580)

    This is common practice, believe it or not, to get around campaign finance laws... How so you ask? Well...

    There are campaign finance dollar limits and those limits apply to actual dollars as well as services or things. So, you cannot bypass the campaign finance limits by giving the campaign free rent or free IT equipment. Anything you give a campaign of value must be reported. There are similar reporting requirements and limits for what one campaign can give to another.

    So how's this "breach" supposed to get around these rules? It works this way, you don't have to claim data that you "found" sitting on a public server, so one campaign throws up the data they want to give to another campaign up on some publicly accessible server, usually in an obscure location. Then the receiving campaign mysteriously finds this public data, downloads a copy and uses it, without having to report it as a donation from the other campaign. This doesn't impact the dollar limits..

    Oh, and YES, being based on a recent court decision which declares "information found in public to be free" this is pretty common.

  • A former staffer should not have these data. Did he steal the data?

  • That's pretty impressive... Assuming that they are using Excel, each tab (worksheet) can have about 1 million rows... so somehow they managed to spread the data over multiple sheets.

    And if there was any other data in the workbook, it's a lot of data to manage in an Excel file. At least use something like Access.... (just kidding). I wonder how long F9 took?

    Obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/2180/ [xkcd.com]
     

    • Since it was named "EmailExcludeClinton.csv" it was probably not Excel and not even a spreadsheet

      Just a plain text file ..... Limit is either 4GB or 16TB ....

      • indeed most people think a "csv is an excel file" since it's presented as such in Windows and opens Excel when double clicked. Don't overestimate the typical office computer user, calling them tards would be insult to the actually mentally retarded.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ... all those Nigerian scam e-mails going around. A list of 6.2 million gullible fools released into the wild. A con artist's dream.

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