Data breaches involving politicians are concerning because of the threat of impersonation and blackmail, among other nefarious things. To shed light on the concern, we estimate how frequently politicians' data is compromised. Using a dataset of 12,384 emails of politicians from 59 countries spanning three decades, we check whether these emails are part of breaches by using Have I Been Pwned, a widely used online service for searching public breach data. A third of the politicians have had their data breached at least once. More alarmingly, over one in five have had their sensitive data, such as bank account numbers, biometric data, browsing history, chat logs, credit card CVV, etc., breached. These numbers are still too optimistic for several reasons, including the fact that we do not have all the email addresses used by politicians. Accounting for some of the biases suggests that more than half the politicians have suffered a serious breach. In all, the data suggest urgent action is needed to protect politicians against cybersecurity threats.
- Politician Email Data
- Get HIBP Data
- Combine and Analyze
Lucas Shen and Gaurav Sood
- themains/reg_breach — Have I Been Pwned? Yes. Evidence from HIBP and Emails From Voter Registration Files.
- themains/private_blacklight — Privacy Online and Digital Divide on Online Privacy
- themains/pwned — How Often Are Americans' Accounts Breached?
- themains/private_gov — How common are third-party cookies, trackers, key loggers, etc. on government websites?
- themains/domain_knowledge — Domain Knowledge: Learning with pydomains