Michael Jay Lissner
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A Real Problem You Should Fix. Now.

I’ve mentioned secret questions on my site before, but I never quite realized how much of a problem they are until today, when I discovered [uspublicrecords.com][1].

It’s a simple site. You put in a name, and if it has that person in its database, it gives you their age, middle name, and family members. So far, I haven’t found any names it doesn’t have.

Using this information, I went and checked a friend’s Gmail secret question, which was, “What is your father’s middle name?” I just happened to have that information from uspublicrecords.com, so I put it in, and changed their email password.1

It’s pretty creepy how easy this is, and fixing this problem could take days as you check all your secret questions one by one. This might make a good mashup: a system for checking all your secret questions.

Anyway, now might be a good time to go change your secret questions, cause if it has anything to do with middle names, that site will hand them right out.


  1. With their OK, of course. [1]: http://uspublicrecords.com ↩

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Published

Apr 12, 2009

Category

Privacy & Security

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  • Mashup Idea 1
  • Problems 1
  • Security 13

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