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Account security on various websites--"secret" questions and lost password retrieval
Often, as a forgotten password measure, websites will ask me to select a secret question and provide an answer.
Questions such as:
- What is your mother's maiden name?
- What high school did you attend?
- What city did you grow up in?
Annoyingly, I'm never given the option to come up with my own question, and often in that case there are no choices for secret questions that I can consider really secret.
And then on many websites, I have the option of recovering my account if I lose my password. So I type in my username and/or email, I get the email and...my password is there, in the message, in plain text. Rather than a link to enter a new password. Having taken a class on info security, this raises some VERY serious implications as to the safety of my account credentials.
Comments
"Annoyingly, I'm never given the option to come up with my own question, and often in that case there are no choices for secret questions that I can consider really secret."
I think there are some sites that do allow you to write your own, but it's been a while since I remember specifics.
There are a few, but most of the sites that throw the secret question crap at me may as well have questions asking me for my first name and what country I live in.
I give completely false or outlandish answers.
For example, if a question is "What was your first car" I might answer something like "one that changes color". This is because I used to actually have these toy cars that would change color depending on temperature.
The thing with that is... it's very difficult to actually remember the answers to those questions. Which is fine if you aren't ever going to lose your account password or something (which, usually, is the case, since I don't think I'm going to forget my passwords to most things any time soon), but if you actually want to use the security questions for what they're for, it's pretty difficult when all the questions are things that very many people who aren't you know the answers to.
That's why I keep a list of them somewhere on my hard drive.
They're just hints, though. You won't find the actual answers if you look. You have to look in my brain for them.
That reminds me. I need to get a password manager so I can mix up my passwords a bit more