21 and hacked

Just turned 21 in the US? Congratulations! You’re now old enough to (legally) drink alcohol…and it’s easier to hack your Social Security number.

As reported by NPR, the nice folk at Carnegie Mellon have figured out a way to hack that bastion of American identity, the Social Security number, thanks to improvements in federal government efficiency. Until 1988, you waited to apply for a SS# until you needed it, usually because you started working and somebody needed to withhold tax money for you.

In 1988, though, the feds wisely decided that everyone was going to need an SS# eventually, so they started assigning them to babies. Moreover, they assigned different blocks of numbers to different parts of the country. Carnegie Mellon researchers were able to crack the distribution and can pretty much figure out the first five digits of your SS# if they know where and when you were born, they say…as long as your number was issued after 1987.

Interestingly, those first five digits are the ones usually concealed to protect confidential information; the last four are more often the “public” part of your SS#. Which means that if you’re a natural-born US citizen under the age of 22 you can pretty much throw any thought of SS# privacy out the window. (especially now that Carnegie Mellon has published the study)

Fortunately, the feds say they’re changing the system to something a bit more randomized next year, so only people born between 1988 and 2009 have much to worry about.

That’s ONE thing that’s nice about being older, I suppose.

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