This article involved a qualitative study which set to explore if participants could guess other people’s answers to some of the most common security questions.
Such questions could be used when a person needs to access a bank account, or retrieve a forgotten password for an email address.
The analysis of this study found that a shocking 49% of participants could guess other people’s security answers to some of the most common questions such as “Which city were you born in?”.
This study highlights the predictability of some of the answers to these questions and raises a few concerns: are security questions as “secure” as we might think?
Reference:
Moallem A. (2013) How Many People – Besides You – Can Answer Your Security Questions? Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications, Volume 21, Issue 4
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