Often times we see people filling out random question sets, then asking other friends to do the same by tagging them. Though this looks like a fun activity where friends can have fun, find out interesting stuff about each other that they may not otherwise know and have a laugh at some things, but there is an underlying risk.

All the questions that you answer in there, give out a piece of personal information about yourself. That information, sometimes by itself and at other times when pieced together with other info can be used by someone as an exploit to gain access to your accounts. HOW? well anyone who uses online services would know that ‘Security Questions’ are a common way to reset your password. And what do those questions ask? always something from your personal life that only you may know.  Have you been able to make the link yet? between the viral quizzes and security ? A lot of information that you keep giving out in your anwers to these challenges may well be a part of your answers to these security questions. That information if it gets in the hands of someone with malicious intentions is bad news.

Let’s take some examples, there was a recent challenge where people posted their graduation pictures with the name of their schools and the year of graduation. Well that very well could be a security question somewhere. Also it could be your hometown, the name of your pet, the first car that you owned.

So then should you stop doing those challenges? well, you might still do them, but you need to be careful about how much information you are giving out. Also you need to be aware of all the information that you may have used as answers to your security questions and make sure you never give that up. We have to understand, getting hacked doesn’t mean that there is some programmer somewhere writing a piece of code typing frantically on his laptop, like we see in the movies, and he is going to steal all your money. In real life situation is quite different (though the hacker might as well be using a code in some way to get the information he needs) most of the times it comes down to how much personal information someone can get about you and then use that to access your accounts.

So then the question is ‘How to save oneself?’. Well there is no one correct answer to that. You just have to be careful. And every individual situation will have a different solution so as to say. Some common guidelines; Do Not re-use the same credentials everywhere. Atleast the credentials for social media sites should be different from something like an online banking account. Prefer using 2 factor authorization for important stuff. When answering security questions, sometimes it may be better to come up with fictional answers instead of real life information (this will be harder to remember, you don’t wanna forget your password and the answer to the question) but it might be more secure. And you can always google for tips on how to secure yourself further online. But rememeber, anyting you post on the internet becomes public knowledge and can be used by anyone in anyway they want. So the best practice is to be careful about what you are putting out there.