RoboCent Data Breach (2018)

RoboCent, a Virginia Beach-based political robocall firm, has exposed the personal details of hundreds of thousands of US voters, according to the findings of a security researcher who stumbled upon the company's database online. The researcher, Bob Diachenko of Kromtech Security, says he discovered the data using a recently launched online service called GrayhatWarfare that allows users to search publicly exposed Amazon Web Services data storage buckets. Such buckets should never be left exposed to public access, as they could hold sensitive data. Diachenko found RoboCent's exposed AWS bucket by searching for the term "voters." He searched for this particular term because last year, he also found a gigantic MongoDB database exposing the voter records of over 19 million Californians.