The Impact of Google Hacking on Identity and Application Fraud

In the last several years, identity theft has been on the rise. The Internet represents an appealing place for fraudsters to collect a host of personal and financial data related to many innocent users. Using the collected data they can impersonate the users and commit different fraudulent activities including application fraud. Mining Internet data for fraudulent purposes is commonly referred to as (black hat) Google hacking. We discuss in this paper the impact of Google hacking on identity fraud, with an emphasis on fraudulent applications for identity certificates such as credit cards, passports, and so on. The discussion is based on the results of an experiment performed over the Internet by conducting some (white hat) Google hacking and collecting sensitive identity information for living as well as dead persons. We also outline the architecture of a security tool for detecting application fraud that is currently under development.