A cybersecurity company said on Thursday that it found a hacker offering to sell data on the names, addresses, age, gender and political affiliation of 186 million voters in the United States
The hacker, who picked « GreenMoon2019, » also offered to sell a separate database that he said contained 245 million records of personal information linked to US consumers, the investigation revealed by Trustwave If that’s correct, that would mean it included data on the vast majority of Americans
Voter registration information is publicly available in most states in the US, but the hacker used other stolen data to match email addresses with voter lists and sell them as a package , according to Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Trustwave, by NBC News
« In the wrong hands, this voter and consumer data can easily be used for geo-targeted social media disinformation campaigns, email phishing, and SMS and phone scams before, during and after the election, especially if the results are disputed, « Mador said
Mador said the data came from various corporate hacks, as well as publicly available data pulled from government websites
The news came when US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe announced that Russia and Iran had both obtained « voter registration information » that could « be used by foreign actors to communicating false information to registered voters »
While most of the information the hacker sold was about US citizens, the hacker was also selling data on people living in the UK, Ireland, Canada and South Africa, according to the report.
The global cybersecurity company created fake identities to convince the hacker to provide more information and created a Bitcoin wallet that GreenMoon2019 could use to collect payment transfers
Trustwave, which monitors cyber threats on dark web forums, discovered several hacker forums that contained detailed information about US voters and consumers for sale
« These databases contain a shocking level of detail about citizens, including their political affiliation, » the report says
The report concluded with a chilling line: « Cybercriminals most likely mix data illegally obtained from leaks with publicly available information about citizens and correlate it to create super databases with detailed information about almost all US citizens and citizens of other major countries «
Computer security, information
Global news – UA – Cyber security firm finds hacker selling personal data on 186 million US voters He warned that the data ` ‘can easily be used for geo-targeted disinformation campaigns’
SOURCE: https://www.w24news.com
