Finding a person responsible for the misconfiguration turned out to not be an easy task. Vickery and DataBreaches.net, the company the researcher contacted to share his findings, addressed various political tech groups and known voter information companies on the issue, but all denied they had anything to do with the database.
"To be very clear, this was not a hack." Vickery wrote on Reddit Monday. "No password or other authentication is required at all. Anyone with an Internet connection can grab all 300+ gigabytes."
Vickery now claims he has his hands on 300GB of voter data, including birth dates, voting history, party affiliations, unique voter IDs etc. He found his own name in the database, too, and after checking the information, confirmed it was correct. DataBreaches.com has confirmed the records are real.
Vickery and DataBreaches.net have been reaching out to authorities, including the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center to shut down access to the database.