Criminals (politicians, Russia?) using crowdfunding to pay other criminals to break in and steal voter registration data. Has your state been hacked?

Never forget, the Republican controlled Congress lead by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell  voted against funding election security in August 2018 even though Homeland Security warned that 21 states were targeted. All 21 states asked for funding and help! #VoteThemAllOut

"To our knowledge this represents the first reference on the criminal underground of actors selling or distributing lists of 2018 voter registration data," said researchers from Anomali Labs and Intel471, the two companies who spotted the forum ad.

"We estimate that the entire contents of the breach could exceed 35 million records"

Which States allow downloading voting information for FREE?

Researchers say the data contains details such as full name, phone numbers, physical addresses, voting history, and other voting-related information. It is worth noting that some states consider this data public and offer it for download for free, but not all states have this policy.

“When these lists are combined with other breached data containing sensitive information, e.g., social security number and driver’s license, on underground forums it provides malicious actors with key data points for creating a target profile of the US electorate.”, Anomali Labs

The list and pricing, as advertised by the hacker himself, is as follows below:

Montana - 1000$

Louisiana - 5000$ (3 Million Voters)

Iowa - 1100$

Utah - 1100$

Oregon - 500$

South Carolina - 2500$

Wisconsin - 12500$ (6 Million Voters)

Kansas - 200$

Georgia - 250$

New Mexico - 4000$

Minnesota - 150$

Wyoming - 500$

Kentucky - 2000$

Idaho - 1000$

Tennessee - 2500$

South Dakota - 2500$

Mississippi - 1100$

West Virginia - 500$

Texas - 1300$ (14 Million Voters)

The seller revealed the voter records count for only three of the databases --Louisiana (3 million), Wisconsin (6 million), and Texas (14 million)-- totaling 23 million records. He is asking for $42,200 for all 19 databases.

New States for Sale

"At the time of this report, the first of 19 available voter databases, Kansas, has been acquired and published," Anomali Labs said. 

"A second crowdfunding project, voted by forum members to select the next state, is close to 20.7% of its funding goal. Oregon currently leads the voting for the second state to be published."

"We believe this to be an alias for the forum administrator named 'Omnipotent' based on shared email address between Downloading and Omnipotent."

Furthermore, Omnipotent has a history of sharing voter databases on his forum. Before the new thread advertising voter records from 19 states, he also shared voter records on his forum from five other US states:

Washington 2018 Voter Database

Pennsylvania 2018 Voter Database

North Carolina 2018 Voter Database

Florida 2018 Voter Database

Connecticut 2018 Voter Database

Ohio 2018 Voter Database

POLITICS

DNC to Restore Voter Database to Sanders Campaign

Zach Cartwright

| December 19, 2015

The DNC will restore access following a swift and unprecedented online mobilization of progressives.

Bernie Sanders’ grassroots base has just won a major victory in the battle with the Democratic National Committee. The DNC has bowed to demands to give access to the national voter database back to the Sanders campaign.

According to a tweet from New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti, the DNC will restore the Sanders campaign’s database access on Saturday morning:

The progressive outrage over the DNC’s decision dominated national news coverage from Friday morning to late evening. A MoveOn petition launched early Friday morning gained over 250,000 signatures in less than 24 hours. A similar petition by Robert Reich — former Secretary of Labor for the Bill Clinton White House — also went viral. Bernie Sanders’ campaign also launched a petition demanding the DNC restore access to the voter file, in addition to taking the DNC to court over the matter.

The snafu began when Josh Uretsky, former national data director for the Sanders campaign, noticed a security breach in NGP VAN, the software responsible for managing the infrastructure of Democratic campaigns. While NGP VAN was installing a patch, internal voter models from other Democratic campaigns were briefly available to one another for a 40-minute window.

Uretsky made copies of the data models and shared them with 3 separate usernames on the Sanders campaign’s NGP VAN account. Uretsky, who was later fired by the Sanders campaign, told MSNBC he knew what he was doing could be tracked in an audit and maintained that he did so with the intent of showing what data belonging to the Sanders campaign could potentially be accessed by the Clinton campaign when reporting the bug to NGP VAN and the DNC.

As quickly as it started, it ended.

Hillary Clinton Makes a Damn Good Republican

Back when Sen. Hillary Clinton was just starting her campaign, top aides and advisers had a ready answer when asked if she could win the presidency.

"She's already winning," came the response, as repeated by chief strategist Mark Penn, campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and other top aides and advisers, in memos, press releases and interviews as the campaign began more than a year ago.

It was a rejoinder that fit the "inevitable" candidate — and for a long while, the response fit the facts.

Clinton, D-N.Y., occupied the race's top perch virtually until the voting started, with a campaign that was designed to hover above the opposition and break through with dramatic early victories that would end the campaign cleanly and quickly.

But her campaign, it would turn out, was based on a series of fundamental miscalculations — about the mood of the electorate, the threat posed by Sen. Barack Obama and even the basic rules of the Democratic primary process.

In retrospect, the mistakes started with a faulty assumption: That inevitability itself could underpin the rationale for a presidential candidacy, even in the face of a deep Democratic desire for change and the wide enthusiasm that greeted a first-term senator from Illinois.

When the veneer of invincibility slipped away, so did much of the campaign's strategic foundations, leading to the staff infighting, public eruptions, financial woes and a string of devastating defeats that contributed to Obama's clinching of the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.