Discover Social Security Numbers

The United States Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary working residents under the Social Security Act. The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent agency of the United States government. Its primary purpose is to track individuals for taxation purposes.

In recent years the SSN has become in effect a national identification number. Despite being extremely confidential, Social Security Numbers (SSNs) have been used within organizations as methods for tracking customers, students, and employees. Although many organizations have made a policy shift to stop using these numbers, there tends to be legacy data where this sensitive information still resides.

Social Security Numbers are a primary piece of personal information that leads to Identity Theft. Hackers target this information to sell on the black market. To prevent data loss, Identity Finder finds and protects Social Security Numbers. Identity Finder performs dozens of real-time validations, many of them proprietary based on internal observations of our data analytics experts, to maximize accuracy and minimize false positives in finding these particularly sensitive pieces of data.

Identity Finder first starts with deep, deep data analysis. When Identity Finder comes across data that could potentially be a match, it applies all the validation techniques it knows exist to determine whether the data meets the minimum requirements for being a legitimate Social Security Number. These search algorithms are updated every month with new information to increase accuracy. For example, Identity Finder takes the definitions issued by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and performs AnyFind definition updates every month.

Beyond deep data analysis, Identity Finder also performs contextual analysis to increase the accuracy of returning relevant information. By performing contextual analysis, Identity Finder can ascertain whether the data is being referred to in a way that would also indicate it is relevant to an end user. Doing this helps Identity Finder ignore random strings found by other software vendors that just happen to match the requirements for being a social security number (SSN).

Finally, Identity Finder puts all of this power into the hands of the end users and administrators. Although the software supports defaults that have been configured by our data analytic experts, users may tune the sensitivity of the search and cater it to the unique data set they are searching within their own internal environment.