Use smart fake answers to online security questions
Why? Security questions are surprisingly insecure. The answers to many of them can be easily guessed or researched because most personal data is merely a click away
The sign-up processes for online banking accounts, new
email addresses, or health insurance apps all involve a few extra security
measures to protect the data inside those accounts. Unfortunately, the security
questions they make you answer aren’t exactly secure. Your mother’s maiden name
just won’t cut it anymore. It’s time to strengthen your security questions to
keep the bad guys out of your accounts.
Mounting concerns
Security questions ask for information about your actual life, information
anyone can easily obtain either through social media or from data breaches like
the recent Equifax debacle. It’s not too hard to figure out which car you drove
in college, or your mother’s maiden name (it’s probably on her Facebook page).
Answering truthfully isn’t the greatest idea.
Just lie
Your first car? Just write your dream car, or the car you
are planning on buying. Mother’s maiden name? Easy, just make it whatever
irksome term of endearment she used to address you before asking you to get
those dishes done. As long as those answers aren’t searchable, you should generate
incorrect answers and keep them secure.
Try a password manager
Of course, you want to make sure you can keep track of
all the false responses you’ve concocted, and keeping your new, false responses
secure means storing them with the rest of your secure data. Turn to your
favourite password manager to store your security questions and answers (or
generate better ones). You can also create a spreadsheet for all of them.
For peace of mind, you should use
the password generator in your password manager to generate more varied answers
compared to simply using ‘incorrect’ responses.
Source | Times of India | 14th January 2018
Regards
Prof. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
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