Thanks for the tips

Regardless, one of my greatest pet peeves about password recovery questions is the use of subjective questions. “What’s your favorite movie” will probably be different 3 years from now when I forget my password and need to recover it. They should be more concrete like “What city was your father born in?” That will never change.

So anyway, I *love* the idea of putting an answer completely unrelated to the question. That’s brilliant. Thanks for the suggestion.

“what’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“what’s your first pet’s name?”
“in what town was your high school?”

This is all stuff that people close to me would know, particularly family members and as you can pick your friends, not your family…. I would trust my family the least out of anyone!

I keep all my passwords in one master encrypted spreadsheet stored on a detached Ironkey USB drive.

But – as a more sensible bank employee assured me – the answer doesn’t of course need to be literally correct. You can say your mother’s name was Chewbacca just as long as you remember that.

But that still doesn’t, of course, address the issue that a large proportion of the security problem originates from WITHIN banks and financial institutions where – I am MOST reliably informed – the standards of internal security are often laughable.