Your Security Questions Might be at Risk! – The Basics
The video above and this blog were created as part of our The Basics series. The Basics is a series of videos answering questions that many have in the most understandable way. No industry specific terms or over detailed descriptions. We created this series to help people understand technology basics that are sometimes explained over complicatedly. It’d mean the world to us if you shared the video or this blog!
Having a strong password can be quickly undermined by having easy to find security questions. If your password isn’t strong you can watch our video about password security by clicking in the top right or the link in the description box below. Many services that have you fill out security questions will allow you to reset your password as long as you know the answers to them. Places like Apple and even your windows computer can be broken into with the answers to these questions. Another major flaw with this is that often security questions aren’t case sensitive. So you can have a long complicated and secure password, but if someone knows some basic details about you or knows how to use Google and Facebook they might be able to get right past.
Common security questions are things like:
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?
This information might not be something that everyone knows, but a lot of it can be found online.
Cybersecurity expert Eva Galperin talks about this in her video debunking cybersecurity myths by Wired. Her recommendation is “Instead of answering those questions truthfully [she] recommends answering them as if they are simply more passwords” These passwords might not need to be quite as complicated as your account password, but they should follow some of the basic ideas we laid out in that video.
By doing this you will make your account much more secure.
This can seem very overwhelming so what we at Pluto Micro and what Eva recommend is using a password manager. You can watch our basics video explaining password managers by clicking the I in the top right or in the description below.
We know that account security can seem like a hassle that doesn’t seem worth it. A common attitude of many is “Why should I bother? Who’s going to try and hack me?” This is an understandable and completely fair attitude to have. It seems like we’re just one in several billion and we’re not famous or super rich, so why would someone try to break into my accounts. The unfortunate reality is that anyone can be the victim of hacking. We see tons of hacks of Facebook all the time I’ve seen family members who were 13 get hacked on Facebook. While we might live our lives and never be the victim of a directly targeted hack there are lots of widespread hacks that simply aim to hit as many people as possible. If we can take extra steps to keep our accounts secure we can lower the chances that we will have to go through the gigantic headache that some hackers can cause us. As a micro businesses we’re all already fighting bad odds. Being hacked puts lots of businesses under and takes a lot of work and resilience to recover from.