In what surely would rank as the biggest data breach of 2015, a misconfigured database exposed the personal information of 191 million registered U.S. voters for more than a week.

Independent security researcher Chris Vickery discovered the 300GB database on Dec. 20 and reported it to DataBreaches.net, which keeps track of online security blunders. The database no longer appeared online as of Dec. 28.

Vickery and DataBreaches worked collectively with Steve Ragan of security news blog Salted Hash to probe the information source; but so far, that remains unknown.

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Roy Urrico

Roy W. Urrico specializes in articles about financial technology and services for Credit Union Times, as well as ghostwriting, copywriting, and case studies. Also: writer/editor of a semi-annual newsletter for Association for Financial Technology since 1997 and history projects funded by the U.S Interior Department, National Park Service and Warren County (N.Y.).