System and methods for identifying compromised personally identifiable information on the internet

1. A method comprising:

accessing, by a computer system, stored identity-theft nomenclature;

wherein the stored identity-theft nomenclature comprises a changing set of words and phrases determined to be suggestive of at least one of:

identity theft; and

exchange of identity-theft information;

generating, by the computer system, a search-engine query from the stored identity-theft nomenclature;

querying, by the computer system, at least one search engine via the search-engine query;

identifying, by the computer system, at least one new computer-network resource responsive to the querying;

crawling, by the computer system, the at least one new computer-network resource;

collecting, by the computer system, identity-theft information from the at least one new computer-network resource;

processing, by the computer system, the identity-theft information for compromised personally-identifying information (PII); and

wherein the processing comprises:

analyzing the identity-theft information for new identity-theft nomenclature; and

storing any new identity-theft nomenclature with the stored identity-theft nomenclature.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the collecting comprises scanning the at least one new computer-network resource for at least a portion the stored identity-theft nomenclature.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the processing comprises extracting compromised PII from the identity-theft information, the extracting comprising recognizing at least one PII format.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the recognized PII format is selected from the group consisting of: token-separated data, one or more columns of data lacking column headers, multi-line labeled data, and magnetic-stripe data.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the processing comprises validating the at least one new computer-network resource, the validating comprising determining whether the at least one new computer-network resource is a likely source of false positives for compromised PII.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the processing comprises normalizing the identity-theft information, the normalizing comprising storing the identity-theft information according to a standardized format.

7. The method of claim 1 , comprising creating and delivering at least one of an alert and a report in connection with the identity-theft information.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the identity-theft information comprises information related to new sources of compromised PII.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the stored identity-theft nomenclature comprises words that are determined to be suggestive of identity-theft information.

10. The method of claim 1 , comprising ranking entries within the stored identity-theft nomenclature according to a relative significance of compromised PII that is gleaned thereby.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the ranking comprises ranking the stored identity-theft nomenclature according to a quality of compromised PII that is gleaned thereby.

12. The method of claim 10 , wherein the ranking comprises ranking the stored identity-theft nomenclature according to a quantity of compromised PII that is gleaned thereby.

13. The method of claim 10 , wherein the generating comprises generating the search-engine query from highly-ranked entries from the stored identity-theft nomenclature.

14. The method of claim 1 , wherein the at least one new computer-network resource is a chat room.

15. The method of claim 14 , wherein the collecting comprises distinguishing spam postings from other dialog.

16. The method of claim 14 , wherein the collecting comprises logging chat dialog into a chat log database.

17. The method of claim 16 , wherein the processing comprises discovering new chat rooms, the discovering comprising analyzing chat dialogs stored in the chat log database.

18. The method of claim 17 , wherein the discovering comprises analyzing a frequency of the stored identity-theft nomenclature in the chat dialogs.

19. The method of claim 18 , wherein the discovering comprises determining how often particular chat rooms are referenced in a given chat dialog from the chat log database.

20. The method of claim 19 , wherein the discovering comprises, responsive to references to a given chat room exceeding a threshold, recording the given chat room for future crawling.

21. The method of claim 1 , wherein the identity-theft information identifies at least one of a chat network and a chat room that is determined likely to relate to identity theft.

22. The method of claim 1 , wherein the identity-theft information comprises a uniform resource locator (URL) to a website that is determined likely to relate to identity theft.

23. The method of claim 1 , wherein the identity-theft nomenclature comprises non-English words.

24. A computer-program product comprising a non-transitory computer-usable medium having computer-readable program code embodied therein, the computer-readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method comprising:

accessing stored identity-theft nomenclature;

wherein the stored identity-theft nomenclature comprises a changing set of words and phrases determined to be suggestive of at least one of:

identity theft; and

exchange of identity-theft information;

generating a search-engine query from the stored identity-theft nomenclature;

querying at least one search engine via the search-engine query;

identifying at least one new computer-network resource responsive to the querying;

crawling the at least one new computer-network resource;

collecting identity-theft information from the at least one new computer-network resource;

processing the identity-theft information for compromised personally-identifying information (PII); and

wherein the processing comprises:

analyzing the identity-theft information for new identity-theft nomenclature; and

storing any new identity-theft nomenclature with the stored identity-theft nomenclature.