In the United States, there are several examples (although some may not be well known) of state, federal, and trusted-third-party vendor networks being hacked and PII being leaked to the black market. A lot of people have had their IDs stolen as a result of these hacks and don't know it.
I remember a friend discovering a flaw in one of the portals used to book hospital visits in Italy by Regioen Lombardia; basically you would enter you "SSN" (codice fiscale) and it would land you to a authentication page, however
just having the SSN (really easy to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code#Fiscal_code_generation) woul
provide all kind of sensible personal data from street address to telephone number and so on. All you had to do was looking at the requests and you had a fantastic JSON with all the data possible. Bad design.
A few years back, sometime between 2012 and 2016, the US had a web site
where you could go in and fill out forms for student loans (or some other government-backed loan program). Once you got on, they made it easy for
you to pull your transcript of your past IRS tax filings, which were
necessary to apply for the loans.
Needless to say, the way it would get you to that point was not much more secure than what you are describing. So, fraudsters could pull your past
IRS tax filings, too, which have all sorts of info about you. They used
these mainly to file fake tax returns requesting large refunds (but realistic, based on your past filings).
Taxpayers were not aware that their IDs had been compromised until they
went to file their electronic return the next year and their filing was rejected because the fraudster had already filed a return using their ID.
* SLMR 2.1a * Tell me, is something eluding you, Sunshine?
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