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People were willing to include their date of birth and hometown, he said, and he already knew that was part of the information used in issuing Social Security numbers. So the researchers turned to the SSA's "Death Master File," which lists the numbers of people who have died. The purpose of making that file public is to prevent impostors from assuming the Social Security numbers of deceased people. But by plotting the data for people listed on the file between 1973 and 2003 the researchers were able to develop patterns for number issuance. "I was surprised by the accuracy of certain predictions," Acquisti said. The system can produce a range of possibilities for the last four numbers, making it easier for a computer to test the possibilities until the correct number is found for an individual, Acquisti explained. In addition, "attackers can exploit various public- and private-sector online services, such as online "instant" credit approval sites, to test subsets of variations to verify which number corresponds to an individual with a given birth date. While it was well-known that the numbers have a geographic component, past studies have used the patterns plus other data to estimate when and where a specific number may have been issued. "Our work focuses on the inverse, harder and much more consequential inference:
It shows that it is possible to exploit the presumptive time and location of SSN issuance to estimate, quite reliably, unknown SSNs," Acquisti said. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, Carnegie-Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. ___ On the Net: PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/
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