FYI: Hackers And E-Criminals May Be Able To Guess Your Social Security Number With A Little Help From Your Favorite Websites

We all know that computer crimes and hacking are at an all time high, and everything done on-line can be tracked, retrieved, and used against us. But now studies show that even the most careful of people can still have their social security numbers GUESSED by those who have the know-how.

Sure, you keep your Social Security number confidential. However, according to researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, it’s possible for crooks to guess most of the digits in the Social Security number of many Americans using publicly-available information.

Researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Grossy took advantage of a couple of practices of the Social Security Administration. Since its inception, there has been a pattern to the issuance of numbers. The first three indicate the state in which you lived when you received your number. The two in the middle, called group numbers, are assigned in a known sequence. The final four are also assigned sequentially, 0001 to 9999.

The two also accessed the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, a publicly-available (at a price) record of Americans who have died, including their SSN, birth and death dates.

The third piece of information they needed was the date and location of birth of test subjects. They found these details readily available for purchase from information brokers, or even divulged for free by users of Facebook and other social networking sites.

While the authors wouldn’t divulge the exact method by which they narrowed down potential SSNs to a small set of possibilities, it’s not all that hard to figure out.

With that said, keep your personal information at a minimum when using social network sites. We are in the age of over-sharing and although it may seem harmless, it’s really an open door for some e-a**hole to gank your credit, money, and even worse, identity.