UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Analyst, Chris Vickery, discovered that a Republican National Committee marketing firm exposed almost 200 million US citizens’ personal details, according to the BBC.

1.1 terabytes of data was publicised by Amazon cloud server, which included telephone numbers, home addresses, birth dates and political views of 62% of the entire US population.

The findings showed information gathered from a variety of political sources stored in Deep Root Analytics spread sheets, indicating that the data was supposed to be used for Republican political organisations to try and create a profile on voters.

Deep Root Analytics founder Alex Lundry said: “We take full responsibility for this situation. Based on the information we have gathered so far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked. Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.”

The data also consisted of citizens’ suspected ethnicities, religious affiliations and political biases, such as gun control, stem cell research and abortion rights.

Written by Leah Alger