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Comment by jowea | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember seeing security questions securing a system in the last decade. Are they still used and I just don't see them or this was some unusual company config?

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They were pretty much only ever used as a blocker for your email being spammed. As in there's very very few sites that would reset a password on a security question alone. The security questions purpose was just to avoid people triggering emails/resets to the wrong second factor. Despite the common belief they are worthless security questions they are perfectly fine when they don't reset the password directly and merely block users from mistakingly triggering a reset to a second factor on an incorrect account.

Do you know the common alternative to not using security questions in the above step? Doing absolutely nothing and allowing randoms to annoy you hitting your second factor with password resets. The ultimate place you rely on either way was the second factor and the questions were always better than nothing at all.

As a ceo, you just call the IT department directly and that is that. In the it’s just tubes analogy sense, it is all just people at the end of those tubes eventually.

What you just described is incredibly prone to social engineering.

Have real people go to the office of the CEO and have the CEO make the reset request in person. Even by phone a reset is harmless if the computer the ceo is using is known to be trusted and company managed. The defense is in depth not circumstantial to one single phone call or method. You can also authenticate the request through other channels.

Oh so I guess the "please fill in your reset email" counts as a security question. Makes much more sense thank you.

USPS uses them. Their customer service rep wasn't amused when I told her my favorite food is heroin.

And here I am with all answers to my security questions as random strings of letters and numbers stored alongside my password in my password manager. I hope I don’t have to give someone that answer over the phone.

I probably raised a fair bit of suspicion last week when I told the Wells Fargo rep handling a declined CC transaction that I had to look up my mother’s maiden name in my password manager.

At this point anyone handling passwords must have encountered enough of us to know that some family names need to be looked up in a password manager, and it isn’t that suspicious. Isn’t that right, my cousin? I can never remember how to spell grandma 38!;&,90-@3!;8,’s name.

I don't remember where now, but I have run into sites that disallow numbers and non-alpha characters in the "secret" question answers. They were actively trying to thwart people from entering random gibberish there. Of course that's silly, but so is thinking that a person's maiden name is some kind of secret, or that people will be able to reliably remember things like "the title of their favorite book."

My uncle is called Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--

Duhangit Bobby

My only fear of doing this is that someone could call in and say "oh sorry, I just typed in a bunch of random numbers and letters" and the rep will go "haha, don't we all!" and let them reset the password.

If that happens then I don’t think my mother’s maiden name was going to protect me either.

Yeah, it is pretty awkward.

My forst car, sure: Capital-double-you, dollar sign, eff, nine, you, bee, gee, capital kay...

Windows still uses them when creating a local account.

And yet, it still allows a single-character answer that is the same across all three.

Or skips them alltogether when signing up for a local account with no password and adding one later.

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