Items tagged with Social Security Numbers
This could be the mother of all cyberattacks; Equifax just announced that it experienced a "cybersecurity incident" that occurred between mid-May of this year through late July. During that time, malicious parties were able to gain access to some of its online databases courtesy of a website vulnerability. As a result, over 143 million -- yes, MILLION -- U.S. consumers are affected by the data breach. We're not just talking about names and birth dates (yes, those were included), but also Social Security numbers. In some cases, even driver license numbers were obtained by the hackers. And that's not all; dispute documents with "personal identifying information" of 182,000 customers was accessed...
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said on Monday that they have developed a method for predicting many if not all of a person's Social Security Number based on publicly available data. The findings were released in an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here's what the researchers said in the preface to the report: Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs....
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