Documents from the Republican super PAC the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund were made public online, including call lists with names and phone numbers and internal strategy memos, the Washington Times reports.
Cybersecurity firm Upguard announced the discovery on Thursday, saying that researchers found a database in August that made 2 gigabytes of files from the TPPCF available to the public on a Amazon cloud server that had been misconfigured.
These files include the names and phone numbers of about 527,000 people, “strategy documents, call scripts, marketing assets and other files revealing a focused effort to politically mobilize U.S. voters.”
A TPPCF spokesperson told the Washington Times: “We take security of our information very seriously. We have already begun to take active steps to ensure our files are completely secure so that such an incident won’t happen again.”
“The presence of the names and phone numbers of nearly 527,000 Americans makes this more than an exposure of organizational data, but a breach of privacy for people singled out by political analysis systems as high value targets for TPPCF’s efforts,” Upguard noted in its report.
“Cloud resources offer versatility and connectivity, but must be carefully managed to prevent sensitive information from being exposed to the internet at large. As political data becomes ever more integral to the political process, the integrity of that data must be protected with the same urgency with which it is acquired and used,”
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