You may have seen a recent news blurp that President Obama’s Twitter account was recently hacked. This was accomplished by the “hacker” guessing the forgot password questions.

If you think about it, these questions are usually “what is your favorite food?”, “what street did you grow up on?”, “what was your high school mascot?” or other questions which are easily guessed or found out through some online research. It this is all that is protecting you, this is an obvious flaw.

But you may say, ‘the forgot password sends me an email, so it doesn’t do the attacker any good’. Yes, some sites do this, but many will say “we sent your password to your@email.com”. What are the security questions protecting your email?

For protection, make your question answers irrelevant which essentially makes them unguessable. For example, for the “what is you favorite food?” question, answer with something like the site name backwards (i.e. hcemcp). Something like this is easy for you to remember but virtually impossible to guess.

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