Jul 8, 2011 14:58 GMT  ·  By

Hackers have targeted Florida voters for the second time in a week by hacking and stealing data from a Florida election center website.

The attack was carried out by the same hacker who obtained information about voters and other election related data from the Democratic Party or Orange County.

The hacker, who uses the online handle Abhaxas, took issue with a statement from Florida election officials who claimed that voter data is safe because it is stored on a separate machine that isn't connected to the Internet.

"Tabulation is in a separate network all by itself and it doesn't talk to anything but itself," Lee County Elections Systems Admin Wayne Magin said.

"Even within our own office, only selected individuals have access to the sensitive areas," added Tim Durham, Collier County Chief Department Supervisor of Elections.

The hacker published a new directory listing taken from a server called v025 which appears to contain csv files with information about election candidates, committees, news, offices, parties and users.

"Glad you cleaned things up, pretty secure now guys," the hacked commented. "This time I actually had to get shell access, but they made it easy," he added on Twitter.

Even if this new compromise didn't exposed very sensitive or non-public information, the security breach should still be taken seriously. It certainly doesn't help voter confidence that hackers can wander freely through computer systems beloging to election centers.

And if there's one thing that past incidents have shown is that organizations shouldn't act boast about a hacker's failure. As shown in this case, this will only motivate attackers even more and could possibly attract others too. Hackers take such statements as challenges and no one is 100% secure.