7 Oct 2004 salmoni   » (Master)

Paranoia!!!

Remember those emails that went around telling us how we could find out our porn star names? The idea was that your porn star first name is the name of your pet, and the porn star surname is your mothers maiden name. Put them together and that's your port star name (btw - I had nothing to do with the creation of this).

However, I just thought: the whole thing was passed around by email between groups of friends and was quite popular.

But consider this: when you open up an account somewhere (like a bank for example), and you forget the password, you are usually asked a personal question in order to "prove who you are". And the most common question is...

Yup! Mothers maiden name. And followed by your pets name (which I have observed quite commonly).

And here are a load of people sending this information out en claire. With full names attached to many of the emails.

Okay, this is a silly idea but it could be:

  1. A superb piece of successful social engineering;
  2. Just happenchance;

I'm for #2. Anyway, </paranoia>.

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