Your mother's maiden name is not a secret

New York

RESOLUTIONS to shake laziness, get organised and gain control of finances are ritually adopted each January - and abandoned soon after. But there is one common bad habit that consumers and billion-dollar businesses alike should have quit long ago and cannot afford to carry into 2018: the use of weak website security questions.

Your mother's maiden name is not a secret. This should be obvious, yet this question and similarly flawed questions continue to be asked of us when we forget a password or log in from a new computer. Website security questions have been around since the dawn of the Web but became ubiquitous after a 2005 recommendation by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council that banks impro…