Data from 93.4 million Mexican voters accessed on Amazon server

The data of 93.4 million Mexican voters was accessible through a database on a US Amazon server. The database contained 132GB of data and could be accessed without a username or password.

It would be a MongoDB database, writes the site Datareaches. Discovered by security researcher Chris Vickery, it contained information such as name, address, occupation, parental names and a voter identification number. It is unclear who owns the server or who placed the data on it. The data itself turned out to be from Mexico’s National Electoral Institute.

It took about a week for the data to be taken offline after Vickery approached multiple parties with the information. For example, he had great difficulty informing the Mexican authorities. Under Mexican law, this data is confidential and there is a 12-year penalty for stealing government data. According to Datareaches, this is not the first time Mexican data has been leaked. For example, there were several incidents between 2003 and 2012 in which data became public.

Recently, personal data of 55 million Filipino voters was also found online, including fingerprints. Although the now leaked data is not very sensitive, it can be used on a large scale for phishing and identity fraud, for example. Chris Vickery was also the one who discovered a database containing the data of 191 million American voters.