arjun_kumar

What is you mother's favourite dish? What does your brother/sister do for a living?
Well, a lot of us have answered these questions when trying to create new online
accounts or when trying to retrieve lost passwords.

This technique of uniquely identifying users with personal questions is called
knowledge-based-authenticatio n. It is expected to add a new layer of security to
your account and thus make things more difficult for hackers.

However, Lance James, CTO of fraud research company Secure Science, says
that there are a lot of bogus sites which get people to answer these questions and
then use the information to hack your online accounts. Hackers have found that targeting
the answers for these questions is perhaps easier than trying to hack passwords that have so many combinations within them. Your mother's favourite dish might have some 30 possibilities at the max, right?

So, the next time you are answering personal questions in some site, think again.