the security of memes

While waiting for my plane to leave earlier today, I read a friend's personal blog. In it, she has posted a meme that I've seen go around personal blogs and Facebook lately. The first time that I met this meme, it was coming up with your porn star name: your first pet's name plus the street you grew up on. (In case you care: Smokey M-21, which doesn't seem like a name that would get me far in that particular business.)

This has expanded to include your Nascar name, witness protection name, detective name, and a few others. Reading over this meme, I realised that all of this information that she has posted has a lot in common with all of those security questions my bank wanted me to answer: favourite colour, father's middle name, etc.

How secure can those bank questions be if many people are posting this information to their blogs? So many of these questions are easy to find with a few minutes on a search engine (my Facebook profile will tell you what high school I graduated from, and then in two more minutes you can find my high school's website to learn what our mascot is. Where is the security?

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2008
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• Anonymous
  November 15, 2008
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