Fun with your bank's secret questions & answers | Hacker News Reader

Fun with your bank's secret questions & answers

tongodeon.livejournal.com

104 pointsaresant19 comments

Open articleView on HN

This is really hilarious, and I think it qualifies as system hacking.

It's also somewhat cruel to whoever has to read your "clever" message.

Cruel? It might make a callcenter employee smile. It's borderline humanitarian.

It passes the Golden Rule test. :)

It's so silly, but very funny indeed (see also the comments on Schneier's post).

But I guess it's only possible because this particular bank really messed up, isn't it? Custom security questions are meant to be used in netbanking, not to be asked by humans.

Are there any other banks who do that?

What happens if

Security Question: Can you repeat the question?

Answer: Can you repeat the question?

Yeah this is quite clever and funny. Plus Zardoz?!? Wow, nice crazy old movie reference, that's awesome.

This is great. Reminds me of that guy who kept signing his credit card statements with increasingly random signatures.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311710

all my emails from etrade start with:

  Hey, you big stud!

A simple "speech injection attack." The bank obviously needs to sanitize the input before serving it up.

Ah... I'd really like someone on the other end to say: "You can change your balance yourself, just use my login - the staff password is sexy_stud."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/fun_with_secre...

I like this one:

Q: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

A: Sorry, you're not my type.

This is excellent! I wish more systems would let you configure the secret question instead of giving a set of predefined questions... (eg. mother's maiden name, first school, first friend, first town, etc), and most of those questions can be found out about a person with some small talk. For places like that my solution has been to give scrambled answers (eg. city of birth, the answer 'colombo' becomes 'obmoloc'. Also this isn't my scrambling method or answer, just an example).

If this clever answer/question takes off - nobody will provide an open question format.

Another simple but effective hack: have a standard untrue answer for your mother's maiden name, first school, etc. Only you will know them. Your mother's maiden name is McLuvin.

I usually provide an untrue date of birth to places where it doesn't matter. The only places that really need to know are the places that also need your SSN. Everybody else just likes having sensitive info lying around.

I answer every single security question with a nonsensical answer.

CSRs get really confused.

I'm changing my bank to this one immediately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com