All US voters database is on sale for $7,800 only!

Dark web is a part of the web where everyone can't get access on. Search engines do not also index this part of the web. Some contents are only available on there, not open for publics. Some peoples with specific software and configuration can go inside it and visit those contents.

One of our team members was crawling of dark web.  Suddenly a listing came in front where someone was selling a database of all US voters which purportedly contains registration records of them too.

'The Real Deal' is the name of the website where the listing was posted. It is popular among many cyber criminals. They use it for buying and selling everything from illegal drugs to zero-day software exploits. As the website says, the seller name is "DataDirect" and he is offering the records of all the voters at a "bulk rate" of 12 Bitcoin which is about $7,800.

That seller also included some purported screenshots of the databases. As the screenshot seems there are many .json files. And those were formatted with apparent states. Such as 'az.json' refers to Arizona, and 'fl.json' refers to Florida. There are another screenshot which shows the information contained on voters. And those information includes voters full name, address, birthdate, phone number, date of their registration of voting, state voter ID number, political party they supported, and whether they voted in the general or primary elections for a given year going back to the year 2000. But the screenshot didn't include any Social Security numbers.

It is still unclear about how "DataDirect (The Seller)" obtained this database. After asking to the seller, he replied that he is not permitted to reveal the source. It would prevent him to get access in there in future. So it not fully confirm that, its contents are legitimate or not. It needs a full look to the database.

But, a look into the purported California voter shown in the seller's screenshot shows us that the data about the voter is entirely correct. The man's name, age, address, and phone number all matched up with what we could cross-check against public sources.
And also, as a guess the file sizes of the state databases seem to match up with how many voters would be in a given state. As an example, California has approximate 17 million voters in there. And the 'ca.json' file is roughly 31 megabytes. The Washington, D.C. database is much smaller. It's about 880 kilobytes. It suggests that a smaller database keeping in line with its much smaller voter footprint.

The seller provided us a sample of five other voters taken from the Florida database. And we were able to verify their name, address, and phone number of one voter in Pasco County. Another voter had the phone number of a Florida middle school in the database, which had his name listed as a teacher on the school website.

After researching on the voters records in the sample, and the screenshot on the seller page shows were updated in 2014. And this suggests that the database could be older in variety, though it is only showing up for sale now. It is also not so clear that how valuable these information's are. Because much of the voters information can already be found on a publicly searchable website like VoterRecords.com. But it is potentially very useful when it is a database with a multitude of voters all in one place. So It's hard to pin down exactly where this database may have come from.

This large database can be precious to more hackers or cyber criminals. Because they will be able to use it for further scams. But there have been hacks on state voting networks in the past, such as the one that occurred in Illinois this week.