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As the world wide web becomes an essential part of our modern lives, discussions on how safe one is on the internet seem to emerge in an unstoppable way. And the people who are interested in the way the internet provides security are right to do so, because in numerous cases, not knowing what you should expect from the obscure of the world wide web has led to terrible issues. This time, the Mountain View, CA based tech giant Google has released a recent study on internet security, which uncovers the fact that security questions are not reliable. Even if the security questions method has been used for a long time and it was regarded as a proper way to deal with potential hackers, at least by the general public, the American tech company Google Inc. has brought some study results that contradict what we thought to be reliable until now.
The study that Google Inc. has led wanted to compare the efficiency of the security questions like `What is the name of your first pet?` or `Which high school did you go to?` with the reliability of the more recent identity verification methods, like the two step verification or the SMS passwords.
“Our analysis confirms that secret questions generally offer a security level that is far lower than user-chosen passwords.”
representatives talking on behalf of Google Inc. have written in their study.
Google has brought two explanations on why the security questions are not efficient in protecting your data. Firstly, the hackers could just guess the response you have indicated. Secondly, people often create fake names and answers to the security questions.
In connection to this matter, Slashgear has recently reported that there is a 20 per cent probability that a hacker would guess what the `favorite food` of an English speaking person is in the first try. But English is not the only language that is vulnerable to the attacks of the hackers. For instance, a cyber attacker has a 40 per cent chance to guess what is the city of origin for a Korean speaker or their favorite food, if they were to try for 10 times.
Google suggests that, in order to benefit from the services of the security questions, people should stop using fake answers to these questions. Their recent survey has revealed that 37 per cent of people fake their answer in order to make them less obvious. Still, it looks like they attempt to make them more difficult to guess in a very predictable way.
Image Source: zdnet
