Identity Theft from University Computers

Different River writes "Someone broke into the administrative computers at George Mason University and accessed personal information, including social security numbers, of 30,000 students, faculty, and staff. "Before the hacking, the university was in the process of replacing students' Social Security numbers with other internal numbers to protect against identity theft." Looks like they just missed it."

Comments

soooo

[ikea5]

no mention of the grades?

Social Security Number

[ikkibr]

Why does it need to be secret? Is there anything important you could do with it?

Someone follow that example.

[philovivero]

We need more organisations using other unique identifiers for people than Social Security numbers. This will seem radical to you if you're a politician, but I recommend Social Security numbers should only ever be used for Social Security.

My mother a few years back pointed out that once upon a time, our politicians actually said, boldly, in front of the entire nation, that in Soviet Russia, the government numbered the citizens. They said this was proof that the soviets were an evil dictatorship sort of country, and not a democracy, where we can vote for naked petrified persons (so long as they are American-born).

She challenged me to imagine a beowulf cluster of Social Security numbers, and how easily such a cluster could be abused (a near-limitless supply of identities to steal).

Now, sadly, all our base are belong to the myriad entities that have our Social Security number (along with mother's maiden name, date of birth, income, and all the other things identity thieves might want). You'd expect us, as a society, to be smarter than that.

Hopefully others will follow the example of this school, and migrate away from using social security numbers for illegitimate purposes.

Re:I always hated giving the SSN

[ComputerSlicer23]

Yeah, I irritated several people, and made a lot of people in the registrars office laugh when they asked for my name, I just gave them my SSN to save time. Everyone understood it was an implication that I was just a number at the University.

It actually saved time. It was the next thing they were going to ask for anyways, and they wouldn't do anything to my records until I told it to them. They didn't need to know my name, and if they did, it'd be on the first screen they pulled up if they felt the need to use my first name to make me feel like a person.

Kirby