Your mum's maiden name is not a secret!

The sign up processes for online banking accounts, new email addresses, or health apps all involve a few extra security measures to protect the precious data inside those accounts.  Unfortunately, the security questions they make you answer aren’t exactly secure.  Your mother’s maiden name just won’t cut it anymore and might make it easier for people to hack your account.

It’s time to strengthen your security questions to keep the bad guys out of your accounts.

Security questions ask for information about your actual life, information anyone can easily obtain either through social media.  It’s not too hard to figure out which car you drove in college, or your mother’s maiden name (it’s probably on her Facebook page).  Answering truthfully isn’t the greatest idea.

Just Lie!

Your first car?  Just write your dream car, or the car you’re planning on buying.  Mother’s maiden name?  Easy, just make up a random name!  As long as those answers aren’t searchable, you should generate incorrect answers and keep them secure.

Of course, you want to make sure you can keep track of all the false responses you’ve concocted, and keeping your new, false responses secure means storing them with the rest of your secure data.  Turn to your favourite password manager app to store your security questions and answers (or generate better ones).  You can create a spreadsheet for all of them, or write your questions and fake answers in a note book.