“The puppy’s name can be whatever you want”, the father in the Bizarro comic tells his son, “but make sure it is something memorable. You’ll be using it as a security question answer for the rest of your life.”
Unfortunately the name given to the dog — say, Poppy — may or may not have been encrypted when it was leaked among details of 500m Yahoo accounts, which included the answers to security questions about first pets. The dog’s name was probably also used as a password at some point as people often use pets’ names — maybe with a couple of numbers at the end.
“Poppy95” is not a secure password but it is fairly typical and it illustrates an uncomfortable fact: our crummy password construction is predictable. And with large breaches of popular websites, hackers are getting to know us better than ever.
