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"Your mother's maiden name has numbers in it?" (bank teller, DMV person, etc.) "You .. give real answers for your security questions? Seriously?" I do the sam
by djsumdog 9y ago
"Your mother's maiden name has numbers in it?" (bank teller, DMV person, etc.)
"You .. give real answers for your security questions? Seriously?"
I do the same thing, real birthday if it's financial or employee related, but for everything else, I'm a few years older on another date. I often pick a security question that I don't have a real legit answer to as well.
- raverbashing 9y agoYes, I try to make the fake answer sound legitimate though City you were born? Just pick any (random/unrelated) city instead of 2DXSDGREDV@#! It's easier if you have to go through a person (which is usually forced to go through a script) also easier on the phone
- jacquesm 9y agoI do this too, some phone number checks and email checks are surprisingly good.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe search space for city names is tragically finite. There are ~35,000 cities and towns in the U.S., but if you start weighting those by populating (and birthing hospitals and centres), you're going to reduce that count considerably. https://www.reference.com/geography/many-cities-united-states-cfb3be08284e6a62 https://www.reference.com/geography/many-cities-united-state...
- llukas 9y agoWhy pick name of U.S. city or more general city in country you live/are related to? There are a lot of lovely and easy to remember names in other countries ;)
- raverbashing 9y agoYes but if a system allows you to bruteforce this you probably have bigger problems
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe overall risk runs a few different ways. One is that you yourself will bee at risk, another is that there will be a high number of compromises. There are about 300 in the U.S. of over 100k population (corollary: the other 34,700 locations have fewer than 100k people each, or are at most 10% of the population). A 1/300 chance of cracking a security question on any given transaction is pretty good odds. Particularly if the crack is then reusable. Another 10% of the U.S. population (roughly) lives in the 10 largest cities alone. That's a 1% likely success rate based on just ten values. The point being that "legitimate sounding but fabricated" may still not be a particularly good option.
- wila 9y agoNot just easier, but actually more safe. The person on the phone isn't usually aware about your security "paranoia" and is being evaluated on how much customers he/she has been able to help. As such most helpdesk employees will accept the answer "Oh I forgot, I do remember I put some random characters in there"... and your random password end up not helping you after all.
- ubernostrum 9y agoAs noted in another comment, the attack on this of "oh I forgot, it's random characters" requires the attacker to know you do this. So if you do this, don't go disclosing it on public websites.
- whiddershins 9y agoAs another commenter mentioned, a help desk rep once gave the clue "it's really weird" over the phone, which would easily indicate to an attack to try the mash the keyboard line. The random character thing isn't great for this use, it seems, as a result.
- ubernostrum 9y agoIf support reps give enough information away over the phone to let someone guess a security question, there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from them.
- always_good 9y ago>requires the attacker to know you do this Nah, "well, it kinda looks like random characters" is information a support rep will give you. Welcome to social engineering and info escalation.
- ubernostrum 9y agoIf the support rep is just giving away enough info to figure this out, there is nothing you can do to protect yourself against the company's policies.
- drdaeman 9y agoI believe the general recommendation I saw was to type something in lines of "never accept this answer - it's probably someone trying to impersonate me | 2DXSDGREDV@#!" (although it's probably hard to do so if the maximum acceptable length is too short)
- mjlee 9y agoI doubt this would help, it seems fairly unlikely that whoever answers the phone would be interested in playing logic puzzles.
- ubernostrum 9y agoThis is how you get engraved plaques, or birthday cakes, with the message NO MESSAGE JUST LEAVE IT BLANK on them.
- drdaeman 9y agoHaha, true. Still, if that helps in one case per thousand, it's still better than none.
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- apcherry 9y agoI don't even try to make it sound legitimate. e.g. How many sisters do you have? Anyone guessing will be trying a number between 0 and 5. I use a semi-random word, colour or car I associate with my sister(s), eg. Audi. When asked for a number no one guessing will respond with a car make.
- bitshepherd 9y agoSomeone has the idea behind challenge/response. You don't have to answer the challenge with a 100% truthful, legitimate, accurate response, because the point is to NOT provide an answer that could be guessed by framing the response in truth, or even reality. So long as you've picked one that matches with what you've preseeded, use a random word/phrase as your response. q: What is the name of your favorite teacher? a: bumble bees in the desert
- cortesoft 9y agoYeah, but the key is you need to be able to remember it. Sure, you could store it somewhere, but often times the reason you are needing to use it is because you don't have access to your normal system (computer, phone) that you use to login with.
- projektir 9y agoI don't recall the last time I used secret answers to get into anything. I don't perceive it as a valid way to get into an account. But the option cannot be refused... so to me it's just a security risk.
- sersi 9y agoI've had to use security answers because I was locked out by systems that detected I was using an ip from a different country and so refused my correct password and were using the security questions as a kind of extra authentication. The amount of stupidity needed to build such a system is staggering.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoDoesn't matter if you give your real bday or not. I could easily google you, email one of your coworkers and ask for your birthday for a secret gift. Voila.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoIgnore my last comment. I didn't follow your logic of putting a fake birthday into the site haha. Doh!
- Xoros 9y agoThe first time (years ago...) I had to enter my birth date on a website that asked it to me for no valid reason, there was a default value. It's now my birthdate on every others !
- sbarre 9y agoJanuary 1st 1970 is sometimes known as "The Internet's birthday" for this reason..
- userbinator 9y agoIt's also the "UNIX Birthday".
- alanh 9y agoRight, leave it blank when enrolling → Empty value coerced to number becomes 0 → Recorded in Unix timestamp format where 0 is Jan 1 1970 → Wow, everyone was born then?
- cesarb 9y agoI never quite got this "mother's maiden name" thing. Isn't your mother's maiden name... your mother's current name, minus the extra surname she got when she married? Why is this treated as a hard-to-discover information?
- alkhatib 9y agoIn the US and other countries it's common for a wife to take her husband's last name. Changes from "Jane Doe" to "Jane Smith"
- ricardobeat 9y agoI think he's saying the maiden name is easily found. At least in Brazil, the husband's surname is _appended_ at the end, doesn't replace the maiden one: Jane Doe Smith.
- Merad 9y agoYeah, but often (usually?) the woman's maiden name replaces her middle name. E.g. Jane Elizabeth Doe -> Jane Doe Smith. I'm pretty sure my mom's maiden name is printed on her driver's license, paper checks, etc.
- lsaferite 9y agoI know very few women that have done that TBH.
- Merad 9y agoMaybe you just didn't realize it, because it isn't very common to see someone's full name? It was very much the norm until the 80s-90s, and even today I think the majority of women still go that route. I just spent a couple minutes searching Facebook to sanity check myself, and so far all of the women I'm friends with who are under 30 and married have done it.
- 9y ago
- Spivak 9y agoI think the best bet is to provide an actual name in that field, just not the real one. Grab a list of the surnames and pick one at random. Bonus if you hyphenate two.