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Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. How to protect yourself (www.latimes.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/usa@lemmy.ml

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[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I mean, it is a limited data set of less than a billion numbers...

001-01-0000 to 728-99-9999

The area number (001) and group number (01) are also known quantites, so you can limit that set down greatly. 729 to 999 are not in use for example.

[–] GardenVarietyAnxiety@lemmy.world 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

~~You're not wrong, but there are enough demographics encoded in one that they could probably match names to a lot of them, if they don't already have them, with some brokered (or stolen) data~~

Not as much data encoded as I thought. Just place of birth, but still. If you are able to get these paired with data, this could be very bad.

Or very good, depending on your opinion of the system 😜

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

Technically not place of birth, it's the zip code of the address when the SSN was requested, but yeah, close enough for government work! ;)