Social Security involves sensitive identity data, benefit records, and government systems that can be targeted for fraud, theft, or unauthorized misuse.
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Social Security is the U.S. federal program that provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits, funded primarily through payroll taxes. A Social Security number (SSN), issued for administering the program, is also widely used by employers, financial institutions, government agencies, and other organizations to identify people and verify eligibility.
For security practitioners, SSNs are high-value personal data: exposure can support identity theft, fraudulent benefit claims, unauthorized account creation, or targeted phishing, especially when combined with names, birth dates, or financial information. Relevant controls include collecting and retaining SSNs only when necessary, restricting and auditing access, encrypting them in storage and transit, and using multifactor authentication and stronger identity proofing for benefit and administrative accounts. Organizations should also monitor for anomalous changes or claims and include SSN exposure in privacy assessments and incident-response procedures.
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Alert says financial account information lifted from systems Auction house Sotheby's says it was breached on July 24, and those behind the intrusion stole an unspecified amount of data, including Social Security numbers and financial account information.…
Remember that cost-cutting group once led by Elon Musk? Federal employees are still dealing with it A Social Security Administration employee has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has put the records of every single American at risk by duplicating an agency database in an unauthorized cloud environment. …
Class act: Biz only serves 60M people across America, no biggie A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data – including some Social Security Numbers and medical info – stolen.…
Names and social security numbers of folks looking for the biggest loan of their lives exposed A major US mortgage lender has told customers looking to make the biggest financial transaction of their lives that an intruder broke into its systems and saw data belonging to 171,000 of them.…
Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, more all out there A Florida firm has all but confirmed that millions of people's sensitive personal info was stolen from it by cybercriminals and publicly leaked.…
27,000 individuals had data stolen, which for some included names and social security numbers Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months.…
24 million Americans thought to have had their personal data stolen and sold for pennies A Ukrainian national is facing an eight year prison sentence for running an online marketplace that sold the personal data of approximately 24 million US citizens.…
The hits keep on coming for troubled ID management biz Okta has sent out breach notifications to almost 5,000 employees, warning them that miscreants breached one of its third-party vendors and stole a file containing staff names, social security numbers, and health or medical insurance plan numbers.…
Zero-days are so 2022. Why not just social engineer the help desk? Casino giant Caesars Entertainment has confirmed miscreants stole a database containing customer info, including driver license and social security numbers for a "significant number" of its loyalty program members, in a social engineering attack earlier this month.…
Crooks steal Social Security numbers and post them on dark web, victims blame holes in Mercer's security An American university founded in 1833 is facing a bunch of class action lawsuits after the personal data of nearly 100,000 people was stolen from its tech infrastructure.…
At the very least, with other costs on top A Florida healthcare group has settled a class-action lawsuit after thieves stole more than 447,000 patients' names, Social Security numbers, and sensitive medical information, from its servers.…
The P in PFC now stands for Pwned Professional Finance Company, a Colorado-based debt collector whose customers include hundreds of US hospitals, medical clinics, and dental groups, recently disclosed that more than 1.9 million people's private data – including names, addresses, social security numbers and health records – was exposed during a ransomware infection.…
Time to rethink that cybersecurity strategy? A US bank has said at least the names and social security numbers of more than 1.5 million of its customers were stolen from its computers in December.…