Picture: Lorie Shaull (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
The District of Columbia Board of Elections (DCBOE) is at present probing an information leak involving an unknown variety of voter information following breach claims from a menace actor often known as RansomedVC.
DCBOE operates as an autonomous company inside the District of Columbia Authorities and is entrusted with overseeing elections, managing poll entry, and dealing with voter registration processes.
Its investigation into the claims has revealed that the attackers accessed the data via the online server of DataNet, the internet hosting supplier for Washington D.C.’s election authority.
Notably, the breach didn’t contain a direct compromise of DCBOE’s servers and inner programs.
“On 10/5, DCBOE turned conscious of cybersecurity incident involving DC voter information. Whereas the incident stays beneath investigation, DCBOE’s inner databases & servers weren’t compromised,” the company mentioned.
In shut cooperation with MS-ISAC’s Pc Incident Response Crew (CIRT), DCBOE took down its web site and changed it with a upkeep web page to comprise the state of affairs after figuring out it because the supply of the breach.
For the reason that discovery of the incident, the election board labored with information security consultants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) to conduct a complete security evaluation of its inner programs.
Moreover, DCBOE initiated vulnerability scans throughout its database, server, and IT networks to determine potential security points which may have facilitated the attackers’ entry to the stolen data.
Stolen information up on the market on the darkish net
RansomedVC alleges that the current incident resulted within the theft of over 600,000 traces of U.S. voter information, encompassing information of D.C. voters.
“We have now efficiently breached the District of Columbia Board Of Elections and have gotten greater than 600k traces of USA Voters,” the menace actor says.
The stolen data is at present being supplied on the market on the menace actor’s darkish net leak website, however the precise value is undisclosed.
As verification of the info’s authenticity, RansomedVC has offered a single report containing what it claims to be the private particulars of a Washington D.C. voter.
This dataset consists of the person’s title, registration ID, voter ID, partial Social Safety quantity, driver’s license quantity, date of beginning, telephone quantity, e mail, and extra.
“It must be famous that within the District of Columbia, some voter registration data-such as voter names, addresses, voting information, and occasion affiliation-is public data, until it has been made confidential in accordance with District of Columbia guidelines and laws,” the Washington election authority mentioned in its assertion.
Nonetheless, election authorities don’t present entry to confidential data comparable to voters’ contact data and SSNs.
RansomedVC informed DataBreaches.internet, who first reported the info leak on Thursday, that the stolen voter information can be bought to a single purchaser.
Recognized for controversial claims
Whereas RansomedVC has claimed the breach and is now promoting the info on their leak website, an nameless supply informed BleepingComputer on October third that DCBOE’s stolen database was first put up on the market on the BreachForums and Sinister.ly hacking boards by a consumer named pwncoder (these posts have since been deleted).
As BleepingComputer was informed, the info was dumped from a stolen MSSQL database and contained the data of greater than 600,000 D.C. voters.
Latest claims made by RansomedVC to have breached Sony’s programs and stolen over 260GB of recordsdata (with a 2MB leaked archive as proof) have been disputed by one other menace actor who identifies as MajorNelson.
The latter occasion launched a 2.4 GB archive of recordsdata on BreachForums, allegedly taken from Sony’s programs.
Whereas the info shared by these attackers appears linked to Sony, BleepingComputer couldn’t independently validate the authenticity of both occasion’s claims.
