Manipulation and Abuse of the Consumer Credit Reporting Agencies

Architecture and Background

Manipulation and Abuse of the Consumer Credit Reporting Agencies Christopher Soghoian This talk will present a number of loopholes and exploits against the system of consumer credit in the United States that can enable a careful attacker to hugely leverage her (or someone else's) credit report for hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the techniques outlined in this talk have been used for the personal (and legal) profit by a small community of credit hackers, these same techniques could equally be used by more nefarious persons { that is, criminals willing to break the law, engage in fraud, and make off with large sums of money.

Vulnerability Analysis

The purpose of this talk is to shed light on these exploits, to analyze them through the lens of the computer security community and to propose a number of fixes which will significantly reduce the effectiveness of the exploits, by both those with good and ill intentions. Speaker is a Ph.D.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

candidate at a major US university. He studies security, privacy and technology policy.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

He has discovered and disclosed security flaws in applications with millions of active users, and is happy to turn his attention to more obscure, yet equally interesting financial, credit and trust exploitation techniques. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: