It is a secret if you answer the question incorrectly and only you know what the real-fake answer is!
Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
191–200 of 274 posts
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say fraud, do you mean theft or identity fraud? 2FA is extraordinarily relevant when it comes to theft with regard to online banking. The purpose of 2FA is mostly to prevent automated attacks or remote account entry via password resets by email or something similar. I'm not sure if you're aware, but Europe has proper 2FA in the form of a dongle type device, and not this SMS BS many companies in the US use ou…
>2FA is extraordinarily relevant when it comes to theft with regard to online banking If theft through online banking even exists, it's at such a low volume as to be irrelevant. Most online banking interfaces are a read-only view of recent transactions. Some provide the ability to transfer funds between your own linked accounts at the same bank. Fewer still provide bill pay for a specific set of partner institutions,…
You're mistaken. All three of my US banks allow you to send money out via bill pay, ACH to accounts at other US banks, and wire transfers overseas. It's Online Banking, not Online Statement Viewing.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#193Does anyone know the cause of the large and long standing difference in banking in US vs Europe? In europe: -for 15 or so years already, web banking has been with 2nd factor authentication (since its inception I assume). In previous decades we would get devices where you need to type numbers from its lcd screen into the webpage login. Today mobile auth apps are taking over. -I have never seen a bank have security que…
Paper cheques are still super common in at least France and Germany.
I'm German and I've seen maybe two paper cheques in my entire life.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#194Every time I'm confronted with these types of questions I just roll my eyes and add a 'Mothers maiden name' text entry to my password manager with a 16 digit random string.
I shares worries I've seen expressed elsewhere that this opens up a social engineering attack vector where an imposter gets through to phone support and says "oh I just typed a bunch of gibberish for the answer and can't remember it." Wouldn't a false, long, maybe hyphenated, but plausible surname be better for this reason?
To protect against such attacks, I write some normal English before getting to the randomness, something along the lines of “This MUST be quoted exactly or it is wrong”. That’s ~40 characters “wasted” (they’ll normally have distressingly low character limits, but I find them to normally be at least 50 characters), but I’m optimistic about it offering reasonable protection against such an attack.
In practice, I’ve never actually had to quote such a string to anything but a machine, so it is mere optimism on my part.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#195Every time I'm confronted with these types of questions I just roll my eyes and add a 'Mothers maiden name' text entry to my password manager with a 16 digit random string.
OT: Just wondering why so many people are using password managers. When you use a password manager you have one single point of attack and failure. I wouldn't like to give all my credentials to one single entity.
That's why I don't use a cloud password manager. I use one that allows syncing my devices directly with my phone via wifi. Doesn't even touch a file hosting service like Dropbox.
Yes, that makes the physical devices a vulnerability, but the attacker would still need to guess or brute-force the master password to decrypt the vault. It's also a much less juicy target than a million customers of a cloud service.
And as someone else pointed out, using the same password everywhere is a non-starter. Nor is memorizing the passwords for more than a tiny fraction of the roughly 1000 entries in my password manager.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Euro SEPA transfers between Switzerland and EU are typically free. At least the major Swiss banks don't charge anything extra. International transfers in other currencies (e.g., CHF, GBP) still incur a fee, though.
The same applies to most German banks in the other direction but this is by business decision and not by law. Thus some banks do charge a fee for that.
You should use another bank. I've never heard of anything like that when I was living in Germany (I used Comdirect and N26, lots of my coworkers recommended DKB and ING DiBa also).
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Australia is fairly similar to this. Particularly the fee free transfers between banks (for both private and business) What’s interesting is that next year most of the banks seem to be launching an instant bank transfer system - big interbank implementation. Right now it takes generally 1 business day if you’ve transacted with that account before and 3 business days if you haven’t. I assume that’s some kind of anti f…
Australia may not be known as a banking superpower but it has the most user-friendly, affordable, efficient financial infrastructure of all the places I lived in. There's the most kickass Bill Pay system ever and DEFT, which allows paying by several methods including the credit card, potentially gaining reward points for paying rent. (Reward credit cards may be pricey though.) Overseas wire cost a measly flat AU$20 a…
> (nope, Transferwise doesn't have it)
fwiw Transferwise has had this for around 3 months now: https://transferwise.com/borderless
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I go out of my way to come up with particularly ridiculous answers to these questions in cases where I know someone might eventually want me to answer them over the phone. Birth city: Octopus Mainframe Z7X
In the same vein, I always draw a stick-figure horse when I have to sign for deliveries at work.
I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing my signature with 8 random hex characters. Possibly selected spontaneously, different each time. Or writing “handwritten signatures are outmoded; use digital signatures that actually mean something” or similar.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#199Does anyone know the cause of the large and long standing difference in banking in US vs Europe? In europe: -for 15 or so years already, web banking has been with 2nd factor authentication (since its inception I assume). In previous decades we would get devices where you need to type numbers from its lcd screen into the webpage login. Today mobile auth apps are taking over. -I have never seen a bank have security que…
Paper cheques are still super common in at least France and Germany.
In France yes, they are an exception (with the UK too maybe). But in Germany banks don't issue chequebooks anymore.
Re: Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
...or whose mothers never married at all... Or people who don't even have mothers at all. The assumption is also that your mother's maiden name is different from your own name. Which is a very questionable assumption. We certainly show our cultural biases when coming up with these questions.
> Or people who don't even have mothers at all. That intrigues me. I can imagine not having a living mother, or even a mother who died before/during/after childbirth. But I can't imagine how it is possible for a child to have no mother at all. Is there a situation that you demonstrate ?
A child whose father(s) commissioned an egg donor and a surrogate?
An adoptee (of a father or fathers) who never knew who their mother was?
An orphan who never knew who their mother was and lived in an institution their entire childhood?
Sure, everyone has at least one biological mother. But there are plenty of people who don't and never will know their biological mother's name.