ITILSec.com - Collaborative Security

There was a big hoo-hah last week about a paper published by folks at my old school, Carnegie-Mellon University. There was so much attention, in fact, that I found myself endlessly humming "Dear Old Tech" over and over. According to the press release, "Carnegie Mellon researchers find Social Security numbers can be predicted with public information." Is that startling information? More importantly, is it a security/identity fraud problem?