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2.9 billion hit in one of the largest data breaches ever — full names, addresses and SSNs exposed (www.tomsguide.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

The SSN itself is limited to under 1 billion possible permutations anyway because the format is 9 total digits. (3 digits hyphen 2 digits hyphen 4 digits.)

And if I recall they also have something weird with the state you were born roughly corresponding to which 3 digit prefix you're issued. Obviously that isn't purely true either because that would only give you about 1 million unique numbers per prefix.

Either way they've gotta be close to the theoretical maximum of the format without recycling numbers.