elvis ain’t happy about this
with all the impersonators around. a study by the peeps at carnegie melon university confirmed the fact that social security numbers are predictable and kinda easy to hack. using a proprietary scheme, researchers at carnegie melon university were able to “identify in a single try the first five digits for 44 percent of deceased individuals who were born after 1988 and for 7 percent of those born from 1973 to 1988. it was possible to identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of those born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts…they needed 10 or fewer tries to predict all nine digits for 1 out of 20 social security numbers assigned in delaware in 1996.”
the social security administration says that the study shouldn’t cause too much alarm cause the code is hard to crack, but that the private sector should not use social security numbers as a personal identifier or password (read: it’s not that hard). also, they said that the agency was replacing the current social security number assignment scheme with a new random system some time next year.
i wonder what all these developments will do to this guy.
photo courtesy of elvis presle music australia
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