In order to print out a tax form, I’ve just had to go through some silly security question rigmarole with my online bank. The wish-it-was two-factor authentication is getting quite out of hand these days. They are really desperate to give the appearance of security. In addition to displaying a chosen\/random image and “security phrase” – ostensibly to prevent phishing and enable me to recognise that I’m in the right place – they asked me to pick five<\/b> security questions and answers. The usual tripe like what was my high school mascot, what is the name of my hometown newspaper, etc.<\/p>\n
I briefly toyed with the idea of putting in weird answers (high school mascot? half a dog) but in the end went with mashing the keys to produce 10-12 characters of alphanumeric nonsense for each answer. Since they’re going to ask me these questions in future, I copied them and sent them to myself in an encrypted email.<\/p>\n
The strange thing is that they do this instead of<\/b> enforcing a well-chosen password. So it’s actually (if properly answered) nowhere near as secure as a 10-12 character randomised password.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In order to print out a tax form, I’ve just had to go through some silly security question rigmarole with my online bank. The wish-it-was two-factor authentication is getting quite out of hand these days. They are really desperate to give the appearance of security. In addition to displaying a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}