Talk:2388: Viral Quiz Identity Theft

I was going to add in the old, old example of constructing your 'pornstar name' of first pet's name and (road you grew up on|mother's maiden name), but I see there's no real agreement which of the latter it is when I wanted to get it straight for editing in. MMN is probably better for "security question" purposes, but it predates The Eternal September anyway, before which it was more a party-thing rather than a security threat against BBS/Usenet/mailing-list users. 162.158.159.132 00:57, 21 November 2020 (UTC) (a.k.a. Frazier Derwent)

I briefly googled 'eternal september' and found it was a date when internet dialogue was swamped by new users. How did this relate to security questions? 108.162.219.248 12:08, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

It's a reasonable lower limit on when internet commerce became 'a thing' (and a large enough pool of potential marks, with everyday household access and not institution/corporate, to make it a profitable scattergun tactic). Though I'd have said a little bit later myself, there was no such obvious spike in potentially naive users as lucrative targets such as online banking started to be a thing. (And attack vectors tended towards things like malware-based login-scrapers in that era, in my experience.) Prior to then, though, any spear-phishing (not yet known by that name) would have been unlikely to have been achieved through the Porn-name Game, online, though perhaps it'll have been taken advantage of if brought up as an entertainment/ice-breaker at a physical social gathering, for traditional 'meatspace' fraud and personation crime, opportunistically. 162.158.154.83 15:21, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

Hairy tries to do something only to find that Black Hat did it far more efficiently - https://xkcd.com/1027/