MacKeeper Security Researcher Chris Vickery claimed to have discovered 93.4 million Mexican voter registration records for the entire country representing all the voters in Mexico in a publicly accessible and unprotected database which has since been taken down.
The database was hosted in the Amazon web services (AWS) cloud and contained addresses, names, parents' names, voter registration IDs and “other things that you don't want malicious people to get their hands on,” Vickery said in a video interview posted to YouTube on April 22.
While it is unclear how the names in the unprotected database became accessible, Vickery told SCMagazine.com in emailed comments that he'd "heard that it's the same kind of database that is given to the nine political parties of Mexico."
He assumed “one of the parties' staff members uploaded it without authorization,” but said he didn't "have any facts to back up that guess.”
Vickery said the database posed an immediate danger to those affected, noting that “kidnapping is a considerable problem in Mexico and I'm sure some cartels would love to have a list of 93.4 million Mexican citizens' home addresses.”
The database was discovered on April 14 and was taken offline April 22 after Vickery reported it to the U.S. State Department, Department of Homeland Security, US-CERT, the Mexican Embassy in Washington, the Mexican Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE) and Amazon.
During the time the database was up, someone would have needed the IP address in order to access it, he said.
In December 2015, Vickery discovered a database containing 191 million U.S. voter records.
