Why Pay to be an Identity Thief? CMU will show you how free

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Why Pay to be an Identity Thief? Experimental Software Makes It Free
<http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/wonews/mar05/0305nthef.html>
By Steven Cherry

Thieves purchased sensitive personal data from ChoicePoint, but a
Carnegie Mellon University researcher can get the same information
free on the Web.

11 March 2005=ADThe U.S. database industry is under a legal microscope
following the pilfering of information that could allow thieves to steal the
identities of hundreds of thousands of people. In a hearing yesterday,
senators threatened legislation to regulate large brokers of financial and
other data such as Lexis Nexis, Bank of America, and Choicepoint=ADall of
which have disclosed problems in the last two months. It was the incident at
Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint that kindled the current concern in
Washington, D.C. In mid-February the firm, whose data is used to check the
legitimacy of the potential customers of other companies, revealed that it
had been tricked into selling the records of 145 000 people to thieves
posing as legitimate ChoicePoint customers.

But why should an identity thief bother with an expensive charade?
Carnegie-Mellon University associate professor of computer science, Latanya
Sweeney, has found an even simpler way than paying a company in the personal
database industry, which critics say is underregulated. She's found a way to
extract all the data she wants for free from the World Wide Web. For over a
decade, Sweeney has been exploring the intersection of technology and
privacy. Her latest work builds on earlier Web-searching tools that create
software agents to extract names, address, birth dates, and Social Security
numbers from r=E9sum=E9s posted online=ADeverything you need to apply for a=
 new
credit card in someone else's name. Sweeney will report her findings at a
symposium devoted to national security sponsored by the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence and held at Stanford Univeristy, in California,
21 - 23 March.

With her software, Sweeney can gather the key data with just a little Web
surfing. She starts with a filter that searches for documents likely to be
r=E9sum=E9s and then extracts the key data values=ADname, social security=
 number,
address, and date of birth. R=E9sum=E9s are found in a two-part process:=
 first,
a program Sweeney wrote last year finds long lists of names. Then a
specialized Google search filter looks for r=E9sum=E9s associated with those
names that contain Social Security numbers.


--=20
    Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566
    Senior Associate Editor
    IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave,  New York, NY 10016
    <s.cherry@xxxxxxxx>  <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org>

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