Researchers have found that it is possible to guess many -- if not all -- of the nine digits in an individual's Social Security number using publicly available information, a finding they say compromises the security of one of the most widely used consumer identifiers in the United States. ...
"For reasons unrelated to this report, the agency has been developing a system to randomly assign SSNs," which should make it more difficult to discover numbers in the future, Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said by e-mail. ...
CMU researchers Acquisti and Ph.D student Ralph Gross theorized that they could use the Death Master File along with publicly available birth information to predict narrow ranges of values wherein individual SSNs were likely to fall. The two tested their hunch using the Death Master File of people who died between 1972 and 2003, and found that on the first try they could correctly guess the first five digits of the SSN for 44 percent of deceased people who were born after 1988, and for 7 percent of those born between 1973 and 1988. ...
They were able to identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of people born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts. For people born recently in smaller states, researchers sometimes needed just 10 or fewer attempts to predict all nine digits.
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Jul 7, 2009
SSN Security Threat
From the Washington Post:
This story may merit a SNORE. With actual SSNs and credit card numbers readily available for sale on the internet (recent NBC report, I'll look for the link) this CMU study seems to be a good academic exercise and an opportunity for the media to do what they do best: scare people.
ReplyDeleteCrooks and identity thieves aren't going to use complex algorithms to "guess" SSNs when they can simply go online (or to the street corner) and get an SSN for a couple of bucks. And the thrifty crooks will continue to do what they do now to get SSNs and credit card numbers -- dumpster dive.
Quite right, A#1. It is easy and not all that expensive to buy any SSN or kind of document you want--any kind at all--for a reasonable price. Or just go out and scarf for it. SSN's are just another kind of information/document out there in the paper market place. Big money maker. This is a big SNORE, as A#1 says. And,count on the MSM to be the last to know. Yawn. :)
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