The Name Game

This is real-life Social Engineering.

(If you've just read for the first time today, you should read all of it.)

The current meme is the "Royal Wedding Name".  

BOHICA. 

Again, It seems that some of you aren't understanding how these things work.  The Royal Wedding Name asks for 

1. Your grandparent's name (first name, male or female)
2. Your first pet's name
3. The name of the street you grew up on.

Previous Memes:

The current meme is the "Pornstar Name"

This meme is asking for your First Pet, and your Mother's Maiden Name. 

Seriously, These are two of the most common security questions used on a very large number of websites.  By publicly tweeting the answer, you are handing over all the details a nefarious hacker needs to compromise your account, and steal your identity.

I cannot stress this highly enough.  Do NOT tweet your Porn Name / Pornstar Name, or any other of these Name Game memes.

There’s  often a meme going around on facebook/twitter/etc.. One of these note things, you do it, you tag your friends, they do it, and so on, or it proliferates on twitter.

These bug me enormously, because they ask for a fair bit of information.  Here’s a brief summary of the answers you give.

 

1. Your Full Name
2. Your Mother’s Middle Name.
3. Your Grandfather’s Name.
4. Your favourite: Colour, Animal, Drink, Ice cream flavour, Cookie
5. Place of Birth
6. Street where you live
7. Street you grew up on
8. Name of your Pet

 

I recognise some of those as secret question/answer pairs from a number of websites.   I’m really only kicking the tyres on this one, but what if someone designed these memes to gather data about people, including data about their past, place of birth, residential address, pet names, other stuff that’s commonly asked for sample questions on “Secret Question/Answer” credentials online.

I decided not to participate in this one unsurprisingly.  In fact, I recommend that everyone who has done the “Name Game” note looks closely at their note privacy settings, just to make sure they don’t mind everyone knowing this information about them.