A tossed in, not given a second thought aside in my post from a couple posts ago provided the inspiration for this post with a little encouragement from Christi at Feeding On Folly, confirmed by a comment from WD Fyfe – do, or how regularly do, or why don’t people do lie on the security questions that accompanied passwords in “password controlled” sites? You know the ones, first pet’s name, first car, paternal great grandmother’s shoe size. All the things anybody with a little observation prowess can deduce from your Facebook profile.
My actual thought was “By the way, those security questions – does anybody lie about them? Wouldn’t that make more sense? I mean if they are the last line of defense and somebody has already cracked your 23 character upper and lower case, number and special character containing password that you change every 4 days, surely they know what street you grew up on. But I digress.” Well, the time has come to, um, er, do the opposite of digress.
It does seem silly when you think about it. These are the questions they ask if you have to confirm who you are if you’ve mis-entered or forgotten your password or the super secure second level site protection. Password requirements get more complex – 8 to 20 characters long, cannot be your user name, cannot be your email, cannot have been used for the last six passwords, include upper and lower case alpha characters, 2 numbers, and a special character or two, and must be changed every 60 days. But if you forget that password they will let you in if you can correctly answer the name of the city your high school is located.
Christi (you remember her from the opening paragraph) suggested it would be fun making up answers and WD (he’s in that same paragraph if you’re wondering) intimated he had lied on them, so I (you remember me from, well, from here) thought, “Let’s do this!” Let’s consider the most common of these questions, Grandma’s shoe size not among them.
City where you were born: Obviously I can’t use the city where I was actually born. To begin with it’s too pedestrian. There are some good ritzy cities out in the world, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, Manhattan (never New York), but the fictional ones are better. Would I want to have grown up in Emerald City? What kind of childhood would Port Charles provide? Oh, I know the perfect city to be born and raised in. Bedrock!
First pet: Considering I spent my childhood in Bedrock my first pet could have been Dino but he seemed loyal to Fred and Wilma and I couldn’t deprive them of that. Unless Fred and Wilma were my parents. That would be a whole different story. Pebbles could have been an older sister and I came along much later. Or perhaps she was the much younger one and I was already out of the house and/or cave by the time was playing Frisbee Rock with Bam Bam Rubble. Either would clear the way for Dino to be my first pet except that seems just too obvious. If I am to stick with Bedrock as home and the long lost child of Fred and Wilma a more secure pet answer would be the other animal living at Cobblestone Way, Baby Puss.
Maternal grandmother’s name: This is taking over the spot formerly held by mother’s maiden name I guess because that was too easy to figure out. But because everybody knows Wilma’s mother is Pearl Slaghoople (you did know that, didn’t you?) I think it’s time to fast forward from prehistory. Think of all the famous women that have graced the world. So many choices. But there is only one that is the most secure. Anna. More specifically Anna McNeill. Most specifically Anna McNeill Whistler famously appearing in Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.
First car: if we’re going to be making things up we might as well make one up with flair. Perhaps my first car would be a Bugatti or Alfa Romeo, a Corvette split window coupe, or maybe a Mustang like the 1968 390 GT Steve McQueen drove to fame in Bullitt. This might be my weak link, the one somebody might be able to puzzle out, the 1964 Aston Martin DB5. If they ask about a chauffeur it would have to be Bo…. But I digress. Again.
There are so many other questions and they keep changing them just ever so slightly but well take a stab at one more. High School Mascot: This could be the easiest answer for a hacker to hack. It wouldn’t take much personal history delving to uncover a connection to the Merry Mountainmen or the Fighting Firefighters. So we have to be particularly suspect in our choice, one no hacker could imagine. Clearly it must be the Hapless Hackers.
So these are my “truthful” answers to some of the more common security questions. What would yours be? And please, please, don’t go blabbing my answers around!
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Bedrock is a great choice! I think I might go with Rivendell.
By the way, you drive a nice car! 😉
Thank you! Yours is also a good choice. Can there really be any bad ones? Lying is so liberating. You can be from wherever you want now!