New York: In one of the biggest cyber incidents, sensitive information of nearly 200 million people in the US was leaked accidentally by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee, according to a media report.
The leaked data contains personal information of nearly 61 percent of the US population. The 1.1 terabytes of data seems to have been collected from a wide range of sources – from posts on controversial banned threads on a social network to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party, a report of DH says.
The data stored in spreadsheets also contained citizens’ suspected religious affiliations, ethnicities and political biases, such as where they stood on controversial topics like gun control, the right to abortion and stem cell research.
The information was uploaded to a server owned by Deep Root Analytics. It had last been updated in January. “We take full responsibility for this situation. Based on the information we have gathered so far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked,” Deep Root Analytics’ founder Alex Lundry as quoted by the report.
“Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access,” he stated.
Experts are fearful of wicked purposes from identity fraud to harassment of people under protection orders.