Another government problem with a feature that doesn’t even work

I recently read an article about a web site called everify. It is supposedly a government web site that allows you to lock your Social Security number so that it can’t be misused for employment scams and the like. This article came to mind because we’ve seen various other sites that were to be used to check breach info and then help you to protect yourself. One such incident was the famous incident of a well-known company that is supposed to be a credit reporting agency who didn’t fix their software. Then, they launched a web site that was pretty broken and did little in the security landscape to ease people’s minds.

This site was a disaster! It did nothing to help people check to see if they were breached, it asked questions which they already had knowledge of, and lots of technical problems occurred.

Apparently, Everify is run by the department of homeland security. I think this should be the department of homeland insecurity. It did nothing to help people, and Brian Krebs took it for a test drive based on a reader who was anonymous who reported this to him.

For all of the ugly details, read Brian Kreb’s E-Verify’s “SSN Lock” is Nothing of the Sort and just continue to shake your head at the government’s lack of anything being as secure as possible.