NPR.org: Social (not so Secure) Security Numbers Issues

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Tuesday, 07 July 2009

(06:13:44 CDT)

NPR.org: Social (not so Secure) Security Numbers Issues

I knew that some of the Social Security bits were based on publically accessible data, but I did not know it was this bad (from the article: Study: Social Security Numbers May Be Hackable.

The team built a mathematical algorithm based on that experiment, and tried it out with the names of students and their information, found in social networks such as Facebook.
They discovered that in one try, they could predict the first five digits of a person's Social Security number 44 percent of the time if the person was born after 1988. That's when the Social Security Administration started assigning numbers at or near a person's date of birth. That practice ties the first five numbers more closely to a specific date. For people born earlier, the success rate was much lower because numbers were assigned at different times during a person's life.

Si Vales, Valeo

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