Wednesday, May 7, 2025
HomeData BreachHackers Stole More than 19 Million Records of California State Voter Database

Hackers Stole More than 19 Million Records of California State Voter Database

Published on

SIEM as a Service

Follow Us on Google News

A newly discovered unprotected MongoDB database contains a large volume of data which belongs to California state voters information that Contains Every Registered Voter Data same as many of voter database leaked incidents have been reported in this year.

Leaked Database publicly available in online that can be accessed by anyone by having the just simple internet connection and the database named as ‘cool_db’.

Also, it was open to view, edit and modifying the entire database by anyone which contains 2 collections of the database. one collection contains set of voter registration data and other collections contain entire California state voters that are holding 19,264,123 records, all open for public access.

- Advertisement - Google News

This Database used by unknown cyber criminals and they already demanded some Ransom amount via bitcoin and later it was deleted.

According to the LA Times California had 18.2 million registered voters in 2016 so this would logically be a complete list of their records. 

According to Kromtech security We were able to analyze the stats data we saw in our report (metadata on total number of records, uptime, names of the collection etc.), as well as 20-records sample extracted from the database shortly before it has been wiped out and ransom note appeared.

Cyber criminals have used this database for demanding the ransom amount which is around 0.2 bitcoin ($2,325.01 at the time of discovery).

A Leaked contains 4 GB of data which including the following level of sensitive information.

The 4GB collection contained data structured with the following rows of Voter Database:

  • City:
  • Zip:
  • StreetType:
  • LastName:
  • HouseFractionNumber
  • RegistrationMethodCode
  • State: CA
  • Phone4Exchng:
  • MailingState: CA
  • Email:
  • Phone3Area:
  • Phone3NumPart:
  • Status: A
  • Phone4Area:
  • StreetName:
  • FirstName:
  • StreetDirSuffix:
  • RegistrantId:
  • Phone1NumPart:
  • UnitType:
  • Phone2NumPart:
  • VoterStatusReasonCodeDesc: Voter Requested
  • Precinct:
  • PrecinctNumber:
  • PlaceOfBirth:
  • Phone1Exchng:
  • AddressNumberSuffix:
  • ExtractDate: 2017-05-31
  • Language: ENG
  • Dob:
  • Gender:
  • MailingCountry:
  • AssistanceRequestFlag
  • MailingCity:
  • MiddleName:
  • AddressNumber:
  • StreetDirPrefix:
  • RegistrationDate:
  • PartyCode:
  • Phone1Area:
  • Suffix:
  • NonStandardAddress:
  •  Phone4NumPart:
  • CountyCode:
  • MailingAdd3:
  • MailingAdd2:
  • MailingAdd1:
  •  UnitNumber:
  • Phone2Exchng:
  • NamePrefix:
  • _id: ObjectId
  • MailingZip5:
  • Phone2Area:

The information extracted from Data appears to have been created on May 31st, 2017 and second database contains a large amount of data which contains a massive 409,449,416 records in total.

In this case, this incident not only publicly leaked online but also cybercriminals sell this database information in Darkweb market for ransom.

It is unclear who exactly compiled the database in question or the ownership, but researchers believe that this could have been a political action committee or a specific campaign based on the unofficial title of the repository (“cool_db”), but this is only a suspicion and The database has been taken down since the initial discovery.Kromtech said.

Balaji
Balaji
BALAJI is an Ex-Security Researcher (Threat Research Labs) at Comodo Cybersecurity. Editor-in-Chief & Co-Founder - Cyber Security News & GBHackers On Security.

Latest articles

IT Worker from Computacenter Let Girlfriend Into Deutsche Bank’s Restricted Areas

A former information technology manager has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging a major security...

NSO Group Ordered to Pay $168 Million to WhatsApp in US Spyware Verdict

A federal jury in California has ordered Israeli spyware maker NSO Group to pay...

BFDOOR Malware Targets Organizations to Establish Long-Term Persistence

The BPFDoor malware has emerged as a significant threat targeting domestic and international organizations,...

Uncovering the Security Risks of Data Exposure in AI-Powered Tools like Snowflake’s CORTEX

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the technological landscape, tools like Snowflake’s CORTEX Search...

Resilience at Scale

Why Application Security is Non-Negotiable

The resilience of your digital infrastructure directly impacts your ability to scale. And yet, application security remains a critical weak link for most organizations.

Application Security is no longer just a defensive play—it’s the cornerstone of cyber resilience and sustainable growth. In this webinar, Karthik Krishnamoorthy (CTO of Indusface) and Phani Deepak Akella (VP of Marketing – Indusface), will share how AI-powered application security can help organizations build resilience by

Discussion points


Protecting at internet scale using AI and behavioral-based DDoS & bot mitigation.
Autonomously discovering external assets and remediating vulnerabilities within 72 hours, enabling secure, confident scaling.
Ensuring 100% application availability through platforms architected for failure resilience.
Eliminating silos with real-time correlation between attack surface and active threats for rapid, accurate mitigation

More like this

TikTok Hit with €530 Million Fine Over Data Transfers to China

Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has imposed a landmark €530 million fine on TikTok...

Subscription-Based Scams Targeting Users to Steal Credit Card Information

Cybersecurity researchers at Bitdefender have identified a significant uptick in subscription-based scams, characterized by...

Disney Hacker Admits Guilt After Stealing 1.1TB of Internal Data

A 25-year-old man from Santa Clarita, California, has agreed to plead guilty to hacking...