Top Ten Most Dangerous Places to Leave Your Social Security Number

Cases of identity theft are skyrocketing, and 32% of all ID theft victims had their social security number compromised according to Javelin's 2010 Identity Fraud Survey Report. In honor of National Identity Protection week, McAfee set out to reveal the most dangerous places to leave your social security number. When your Social Security number is used to commit fraud, it feels very personal. It can take hundreds of hours and sometimes thousands of dollars to rectify this violation.

Criminals find these crucial nine digits on discarded files in dumpsters, inside an organizations' file cabinets, in any of the hundreds of databases maintained by government, corporate, and educational institutions, or even in public records, which are freely accessible on the Internet. Robert Siciliano, on behalf of McAfee, analyzed data breaches published by the Identity Theft Resource Center, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Open Security Foundation that involved Social Security number breaches from January 2009 - October 2010 to reveal the riskiest places to lose your ID.