Editing 1820: Security Advice

Jump to: navigation, search

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 49: Line 49:
 
|- id="tip7"
 
|- id="tip7"
 
|Change your maiden name regularly
 
|Change your maiden name regularly
βˆ’
|A {{w|maiden name}} is the family name that a woman has at birth. (The gender-neutral term is "birth name" or "birth surname"; it is unclear whether this "advice" is meant to apply only to women.) Security experts frequently criticize the concept of security questions like "what is your mother's maiden name?", on the basis that they can often be deduced from publicly available information. In the sense that it refers to a historical fact, a maiden name cannot be changed retroactively, although in the sense that it refers to the last name on one's birth certificate, in some narrow cases this ''can'' be amended. For instance, when someone is {{w|adoption|adopted}} and takes their adoptive parent's last name, in many jurisdictions a {{w|legal fiction}} holds that they have had that last name since birth, and governments will issue new birth certificates to that effect. However, it is unlikely for anyone to be able to amend the surname on their birth certificate more than once, and impossible to do so "regularly".
+
|Your maiden name is the family name with which you were born. Literally changing your maiden name is impossible by the definition of "maiden name". A common tip is to change your passwords regularly. Some password recovery procedures ask for a security question, like "what is your mother's {{w|Maiden and married names|maiden name}}"? Maiden names and other trivia typically asked by security questions are not secret, so they are inherently insecure.
  
 
A real tip for dealing with security questions is to enter false data.
 
A real tip for dealing with security questions is to enter false data.

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)