Friday, September 12, 2003
Is Identity Theft Getting Easier?
Posted by Janak Parekh in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 10:00 PM
You'd think that progress in securing consumer's privacy has been made, given the recent spectacular reports of how easily SSNs and other valuable pieces of data are pulled down from the Internet, right? Guess again. Robert X. Cringely (ironically, an identity with two people behind it) recently had a very scary experience -- and found a trivial way to obtain several hundred thousand identities. 8O
"Sure enough, in less than an hour I had updated names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for the more than 300,000 entries that were in common across both CD's. What I produced in that hour was all the information required to steal the identities of 300,000 people, most of whom would be considered to have high financial (if not emotional or artistic) net worth. If I was a real criminal I could use this data over a period of 4-6 weeks to apply for online credit cards and bank accounts, to order credit reports that list where the victims do their banking so I could loot those accounts, too. Before anyone would notice I could grab that Secret Service equivalent of $217,000 per victim for a total take of $65 billion, which certainly beats my day job."
As our lives get more connected, and we have more technology at our fingertips, I can't see this go anywhere but down. Do we have any hope in solving it?
"Sure enough, in less than an hour I had updated names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for the more than 300,000 entries that were in common across both CD's. What I produced in that hour was all the information required to steal the identities of 300,000 people, most of whom would be considered to have high financial (if not emotional or artistic) net worth. If I was a real criminal I could use this data over a period of 4-6 weeks to apply for online credit cards and bank accounts, to order credit reports that list where the victims do their banking so I could loot those accounts, too. Before anyone would notice I could grab that Secret Service equivalent of $217,000 per victim for a total take of $65 billion, which certainly beats my day job."
As our lives get more connected, and we have more technology at our fingertips, I can't see this go anywhere but down. Do we have any hope in solving it?
