So, you are trying to use an account online, and because you’ve forgotten your password, you are asked to answer a security question in order to recover your account. This time, you are being asked to enter the name of your first pets name. Is it Fluffy, Muffy or Tuffy? And is it your very first pet or the first pet you remember growing up with as a child? It can all be very confusing, and worse still, apparently not very secure at all. These random questions often have all too familiar answers, and according to Google’s research, are straightforward enough to be correctly guessed in less than 10 attempts.
Google has released a great little infographic (below), detailing the different ways that we make it easy for online criminals to breach our online security. You might think that one of the more obvious ways to make our online accounts more resistant to attacks would be to simply ask more security questions, making it more difficult to guess correctly. While more security questions does make it more difficult for the attacker, bringing their success rate down to 1%, it also means that the account holder (you), will be less able to actually remember what the answers are, dropping from above 74% down to 59%.
Google came about this information by analysing the hundreds of millions of secret questions and answers that had been used for millions of account recovery claims
If adding more and more security questions isn’t the answer, what is? Google believes that websites should rather us SMS-based reset codes and alternate recovery email addresses, something that Google and other big websites already offer in one form or another. If you aren’t sure if your account is safe, why not visit Google’s Security Checkup to make sure. In the meantime, you can have a look at the various security questions that are asked, and the criminal’s success rate at guessing the correct answers.
Source: Google
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