Re:GitHub sued for aiding hacking in Capital One breach
by bufferoverflow on Sunday August 04, 2019 @12:02PM
(#20607297)
You missed the whole point of the comment you replied to. You can detect the format of the SSN, but you can't reliably tell that it actually is a SSN, and not some other type of identifier.
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Re:GitHub sued for aiding hacking in Capital One breach
by colejohnson66 on Sunday August 04, 2019 @12:25PM
(#20607448)
Exactly. At Target, their internal SKUs follow the format xxx-xx-xxxx. That happens to be the same as the SSN format
Re:GitHub sued for aiding hacking in Capital One breach
by throwawaywego on Sunday August 04, 2019 @03:13PM
(#20608630)
Can you yourself reliably detect if something is a list of SSN's or some other type of identifier?
I think you can. Now when we have neural nets capable of distinguishing 100s of different dog breeds, we still have to trip on the most basic and structured type of entity extraction? No. A simple regex, combined with heuristics, and a linear model on top can reliably detect SSN's.
Just that there will be a few false positives (no matter if you automate this, or do this manually) does not mean it is a Herculean technical challenge to do this.