Aside from COVID-19 outbreaks, second waves and panic buying, a huge part of news coverage in 2020 has been focused on the recent US Presidential Election. Whilst it is now official that Joe Biden received enough Electoral College votes to claim victory, President Trump is still launching legal action, claiming that the election was not legal and that a large number of early votes should not be counted. While President Trump was alleging that illegal voting activities were being carried out in certain States, hidden under the radar on the Dark Web, actual cybercrimes were taking place, which threatened to disrupt the election process.
Two weeks before Election Day, global cybersecurity company, Trustwave, reported that their “SpiderLab team discovered massive databases with detailed information about US voters and consumers offered for sale on several hacker forums”.
The hacker that Trustwave discovered, known as Greenmoon2019, was selling personally identifying information, including the voter registration data of 186 million citizens. That huge figure made up almost the entire voting population in the US. The information contained in the voter database was extremely valuable to the cybercrime community, as not only did it contain names and addresses, but it also showed the political party that each voter was aligned to. This type of data could be used to carry out social engineering scams and spread misinformation to potentially impact the elections, particularly in swing states.
Figure 1: Data about 186 million US voters on sale. (Source: Trustwave)
One interesting fact to note, is that in many US States, voter information is publicly available from Government websites. However, the data being s ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
