What are the usual security questions?
Some of the more common security questions with answers that might sometimes be found on one’s social media pages include the following:
- What is your mother’s maiden name?
- What is the name of your first pet?
- What was your first car?
- What elementary school did you attend?
- What is the name of the town where you were born?
How do I answer security questions?
Create nonsense answers to security questions. A random string of letters and numbers (and special characters, if allowed) is better than a real word. If given the option, create your own security questions rather than choosing from the provided questions. Make your questions nonsense, and irrelevant to your answers.
What are the most popular security questions?
Here are examples of some common security questions:
- In what city were you born?
- What is the name of your favorite pet?
- What is your mother’s maiden name?
- What high school did you attend?
- What is the name of your first school?
- What was the make of your first car?
- What was your favorite food as a child?
How do you create a security question?
Let’s take a look at each of these criteria in more detail.
- Safe. When choosing security questions, it’s extremely important that the correct answers cannot be guessed or researched over the internet.
- Stable. A good security question should have a fixed answer, meaning that it won’t change over time.
- Memorable.
- Simple.
- Many.
Do security questions work?
Security questions offer some protection but aren’t enough to effectively secure user accounts. Better answers include SMS or email two-factor authentication or the adoption of physical keys — no guesswork needed.
What do you need to know about security questions?
The user must be able to recall the answer to the question, potentially years after creating their account. The answer to the question must not change over time. The user must be able to answer the question. The answer to the question must be hard for an attacker to obtain. The answer should be clear to the user.
Can a user write their own security question?
Allowing users to write their own security questions can result in them choosing very strong and unique questions that would be very hard for an attacker to guess. However, there is also a significant risk that users will choose weak questions.
Which is an example of a user defined security question?
With user defined security questions, the user must choose a question from a list, and provide an answer to the question. Common examples are “What is your favourite colour?” or “What was your first car?”
How are security questions stored in OWASP cheat sheet?
The answers to security questions may contain personal information about the user, and may also be re-used by the user between different applications. As such, they should be treated in the same way as passwords, and stored using a secure hashing algorithm such as Bcrypt. The password storage cheat sheet contains further guidance on this.