The 10 Most Vulnerable Things About You

Worried about identity theft? You should be. Here’s a few 2009 statistics from Spendonlife.com:

And here’s what a hacker is dying to know about you to get started on their crime spree:

1. Your Social Security Number. An SSN is the gateway to a thousand possibilities for a hacker. It is the proverbial Golden Ticket. Employment records, transcripts, credit reporting, applications for banking accounts and other financial securities, file for past tax returns, and so on.

2. Your Driver’s License Number. If one needs a physical piece of evidence to vouch for your identity, a Driver’s License is the gold standard. It doesn’t matter which state and it nearly doesn’t matter if it’s expired. The Driver’s License number is a coveted artifact of your information-self.

3. Your Mother’s Maiden Name. This is the most common form of challenge when attempting to vouch an identity, and the best thing is that it’s constant: it never changes! So if the hacker knows the answer to this question then they can pose as you nearly everywhere.

4. Your Date of Birth. Another great piece of information that is constant across multiple information systems. And it’s so easy to get at! Usually, social networking sites have a DOB conveniently listed in a user’s profile. It’s there for the asking. And if you’re lucky, you might be able to find a couple of links to mom and, you know, other people with her maiden name … like, well, her family.

5. A Single Password or PIN. Alas, humans are creatures of predictability, rut, and habit. Once you figure out a good set of passwords to use that’s easy to remember and type, you’ll probably use that same password – or a slight variation of that password like password1, password2, password3 – over and over again. Hackers bet on human laziness. If they’re able to figure out just one password, they’ve likely got 90-percent of the next password they’ll come across.

6. The Names of Your Children. Why? Not because the hacker has nefarious intentions, but because names make easy passwords.

7. Your Birth Certificate. Combined with a Driver’s License, or Utility Bill, or a Social Security Number, you can pretty much be whoever you want to be. If you’re wanting to reinvent yourself, all you need is one of these. Take a look at some instructions online to get started. See how easy it is to create an identity.

8. An Old Address. Often, when attempting to conduct some manner of business over the telephone, the party looking to verify your identity will ask for a previous address. They do this because they can verify the old address on a credit report. If a hacker is able to get just one of these, perhaps two, that may be enough to convince the party on the other end of the phone that they are who they claim to be.

9. A Utility Bill. Another great reason to own a shredder. Listen, in the shady world of poverty and scarcity, things like Utility Bills are used to verify a residence because it’s the only tangible form of confirmation that somebody might be able to muster. The presumption is, of course, that the utility company is both accurate and thorough (not!) in confirming the identity of others, and, that you’d only be in possession of a Utility Bill if it were mailed to you because of mail fraud.

10. A Picture. Oh, these are so easy to come by with the invention of Facebook. If you’re forging a Driver’s License or some other identification requiring a picture ID, how easy it is to take a stroll through Google.

Through picking up just a few pieces about you, the potential identity thief can bank on your good credit and reputation to pay off in spades for them. So, you might want to ask yourself – and you may want to ask anyone else with whom you’re financially connected – what are you doing, right now, to safeguard these pieces of information?

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