Voter Databases in Illinois Found with Serious Security Issues

TapTechNews August 10th news, security researcher JeremiahFowler recently discovered that some voter databases in the state of Illinois, USA, did not have passwords set, and the relevant ballots were even publicly stored in plaintext in a scanned manner, affecting about 13 counties and 4.3 million voters, and any malicious person could directly know the contents of others' ballots.

It is known that these databases are managed by a company named PlatinumTechnologyResource. After discovering this problem, Fowler immediately notified the relevant company, but the company did not take immediate action. So Fowler turned to contact the technical support company Magenium of the database software party.

After confirming the problem, Magenium quickly restricted the public access rights to the relevant databases, but it is not yet clear how long these election databases have been exposed to the outside world, and it is necessary to determine through internal digital forensics whether the relevant content has been unauthorizedly accessed by malicious people.

In addition to the databases that did not have passwords at all, TapTechNews also learned from the report that JeremiahFowler found that there are 15 databases using weak passwords or databases with potential security risks, and the security strategies of these databases can be easily deciphered by hackers and are therefore prone to being targeted.

JeremiahFowler said that this incident involves the leakage of voters' personal information/election data, which not only threatens personal privacy and security, but may also have an impact on the fairness and transparency of the election. In order to prevent similar incidents from happening again, relevant companies should adopt more complex database security strategies and conduct regular security audits and risk assessments to ensure the security of relevant data.