Security Questions Expose Personal Information to Cyber Criminals & hackers.
You might like having security questions as another layer of protection for your personal accounts, but did you know what you think is protecting you is actually making you even more vulnerable?
Security Questions often ask things such as:
The questions above all have answers that don’t change, while being used by multiple sources such as banks and other credit outlets.
This makes you extremely vulnerable as Cyber Criminals find this information as valuable, perhaps even more so than gaining access to your password.
Imagine the damage Cyber Criminals are capable of when you arm Cyber Criminals with all this personal information. You become the perfect candidate for identity theft.
Cyber Criminals will use your personal security questions to contact your bank and gain access, enabling them to take your money out of your account. They can then use that same information to make purchases that may amount to thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars with your personal credit.
If a cyber criminal has the answers to your security questions, they likely don’t need your password because they’ll change it to something that is more convenient for them, and leave you locked out.
Just thinking about a potential breach of your personal or professional information makes one extremely uncomfortable, when you realize that the safeguards, such as security questions, are actually putting you at greater risk.
By now you’re asking, “If security questions are leaving me vulnerable, how am I supposed to protect my accounts from being infiltrated by cyber criminals?”
You might think security questions are bad, but they do offer an opportunity to create another layer of security to protect you from cyber criminals, provided you create answers that change, and are not so simple.
The best strategy is creating unique answers for each account, and even changing them up every so often.
Yes, that means you won’t be using the real answers to those questions, but it’s easy to not use the answers to those questions when you are protecting yourself, your organization & your family from cyber criminals who have no problem stealing from you.
Just be sure to record your answers to your security questions in a safe place, such as in 1Password, a tool designed to build extremely difficult passwords that are unique to each account, while requiring you to remember only one password in your device.
A little extra effort goes a long way to avoid a catastrophic situation resulting from a hacker or cyber criminal gaining access to your supposedly secure information.
Learn more about protecting your personal & professional information by contacting our security professionals at WatchPoint Data.