07 Jul Carnegie Mellon researchers find social security numbers can be predicted with public information
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most — and sometimes all — of an individual’s nine-digit Social Security number.
Project lead Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon’s H. John Heinz III College, and Ralph Gross, a post-doctoral researcher at the Heinz College, have found that an individual’s date and state of birth are sufficient to guess his or her Social Security number with great accuracy. The study findings will appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and will be presented on July 29 at the BlackHat 2009 information security conference in Las Vegas.
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