INSPECTING ARCHIVED INTELLIGENCE (OUTDATED VERSION).

Democratic Organization Leaked Six Million Email Addresses in Data Breach

| 2025-07-26 03:27 CRITICAL LOW DATA BREACH
JSON
Executive Summary
AI-generated
In July 2019, a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage bucket belonging to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) was discovered by UpGuard researchers. The bucket contained approximately 6.2 million email addresses from major email providers, universities, government agencies, and the military, which were exposed due to inadequate security measures. The data breach occurred when a DSCC employee uploaded the list of email addresses in 2010, referencing Hillary Clinton's earlier runs for Senator of New York. By July 25th, 2019, at approximately 4PM, UpGuard researchers discovered the bucket and notified the DSCC the next morning, Friday, July 26th, securing it by 2PM that day to prevent malicious use of the data.
Technical Mitigations AI-generated
• Use a secure S3 bucket policy to restrict access to sensitive data, such as the one that was breached in this case. • Regularly review and update AWS IAM permissions to prevent unauthorized users from accessing buckets or files. • Implement Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE) on sensitive data to protect it even if an attacker gains access to the bucket.
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be•••••.net
sb•••••.net
Em•••••.zip
Em•••••.csv
Intelligence Metadata
Actors / Malware / CVEs / Campaigns
Campaign CommitteeCampaign Committee
Target & Sectors
NORTH_AMERICA NORTH_AMERICA educationeducation governmentgovernment
Incident Timeline
‎July 25th, 2019
A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee email list containing over 6 million addresses was leaked in a 145MB .csv file.
data_breach 145 file
Over 6 Million Email Addresses The 145MB .csv file contained over 6,235,397 lines, each of which was an email address.
‎2025/07/26
Threat actors exploited a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage bucket belonging to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, exposing approximately 6.2 million email addresses from major providers and various organizations.
infrastructure 492 distinct .edu email domains
…92,875 verizon.net 82,594 bellsouth.net 65,351 Analysis also showed a long tail of thousands of other, less commonly used email domains, including email domains associated with businesses and 492 distinct .edu email domains.
Tactical Metrics
Metrics
infrastructure
492
Distinct .Edu Email Domains
…92,875 verizon.net 82,594 bellsouth.net 65,351 Analysis also showed a long tail of thousands of other, less commonly used email domains, including email domains associated with businesses and 492 distinct .edu email domains.
Metrics
data_breach
145
File
Over 6 Million Email Addresses The 145MB .csv file contained over 6,235,397 lines, each of which was an email address.
Intelligence Sources
Upguard 2025-07-26