January 28 is National Data Privacy Day. To help celebrate, take this quiz:
- Where did you and your partner first meet?
- Color preference reveals your true personality. Which color is your favorite?
- Who is the most famous person you have spoken to?
- Every person needs a motto for the New Year. What’s yours?
- What was your high school mascot?
- If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
Now:
- Which of the above are Facebook questions? Answer: 1–5; possibly 6.
- Which of the answers to the above questions are or may well be someone’s security answer for website logins requiring multifactor authentication? Answer: 1–5; hopefully not 6.
The point: Never underestimate the ingenuity or ability of an industrious scoundrel to determine how to harvest a person’s website credentials.
This reminder is oft-repeated, but not outdated: Do not to assume your social media sites are private. Check the privacy settings of each, and adjust them accordingly.
Also, do not overshare, or at least do not overuse. A security question is anything but secure if the answer is public knowledge. One previously suggested method of keeping the answers to security questions secret is to use erroneous answers known only to you. That way, no amount of background searching will uncover the “correct” security question responses.
Check out our series, Privacy Perils, to learn what steps you can take to guard your personal and company data. For more information about this topic and other cyber security concerns, please contact a member of our Privacy & Data Security team.