News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Something weird is happening on Facebook. Parent comment

Re:Something weird is happening on Facebook by mywittyname on Monday September 27, 2021 @05:01PM (#28675952)
My understanding is that a portion of the SSN is based on the ZIP of your birthplace. I'm sure some clever person could come up with a way to use birth location + a checksum that would reveal an SSN without actually typing it out.

I'm thinking something like, "Add up all the individual numbers of your SSN and figure out what Founding Father you are!" Use some statistics to ensure that lots of people get good ones.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Something weird is happening on Facebook by jrwr on Monday September 27, 2021 @05:12PM (#28676085)
Used too, But anyone under the age of 20 will have a random SSN [1]

1: https://www.ssa.gov/kc/SSAFactSheet--IssuingSSNs.pdf

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Something weird is happening on Facebook by snowycat on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @01:52AM (#28679745)
The first 5 digits are directly correlated to DOB and birthplace, the last 4 are mostly random. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975 There's a pretty interesting study done on this.
[ Parent | on HN ]