Breaking the Social Security Code

The key to successful identity theft is to be able to tie your social security number to your name. That is basically the key identifier. A security breach of data that exposes that link triggers identity theft monitoring results in financial burden.

Now it seems that the social security number code can be predicted:

“It is possible to use publicly available data on state and date of birth to predict someone’s Social Security number, particularly if they were born after 1988 and in smaller states, according to an article published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The ability to use statistic inference to predict the sensitive data exposes the Social Security numbers to identity fraud risks on “mass scales,” the article said.”

link: Report: Social Security numbers can be predicted

The extent of the identity theft could be staggering. If it was possible to generate social security numbers with even a fair degree of accuracy, the economic devastation would be open ended. For identity thieves, this is the ‘key to the vault’.

Catherine Forsythe