Here's $50; Steal The Identity Of Everyone In Baltimore
from the no-problem dept
The fact that it's easy to steal identities is nothing new. Stories like that have been showing up for ages. However, to demonstrate just how easy it is Johns Hopkins professor Avi Rubin told his students to take $50 and (legally!) try to obtain as much information as possible on people in the city of Baltimore. As you might imagine, it wasn't particularly difficult, mixing a variety of publicly available info and some social engineering, quite a bit of data was collected. Then, to make the situation even more fun, they compiled the data into a nice, searchable database. Just another reminder of how easy it is to steal someone's identity. Still, what's not clear is how to stop such things from happening. Most of this data is public for a reason. So, once again, perhaps a better solution is setting up the data in a way that everyone can manage their own data and see who accesses it. If the data is going to be out there, hiding what's happening from the people most at risk doesn't make much sense.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Consider the source
Take his works with a large bit of salt.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Consider the source
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Consider the source
Perhaps you'll find it somewhere it your copy of Newsweek.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Consider the source
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Consider the source
[ link to this | view in chronology ]