Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Your Mother's Maiden Name Is Not A Secret'

1117 Words5 Pages

Rhetorical Analysis of "Your Mother 's Maiden Name Is Not a Secret" In Anne Diebel 's article "Your Mother 's Maiden Name Is Not a Secret" from The New York Times, she argues that websites that contain important or personal information "protected" by security questions are not secure and need to be replaced. This article was written just after several cyber attacks that happened in the previous year. Although Diebel uses many logical arguments, including statistics and examples, her argument is not effective as a whole because of a lack of solid facts with certain evidence and strong credibility. Deibel begins her article by pointing out that basic security questions have been overlooked and accepted for too long. Diebel blames attributes the blame to banks when they chose security questions to "improve their security measures for online banking" (2). She says that other websites probably assumed the banks knew what they were doing and followed suit (2). She states that security questions are much more insecure than they seem at first glance, and "the answers to many of them can be easily researched or guessed" (3). She also points out incidents of famous people 's accounts getting hacked into via security questions (5), followed by an example of a recent cyber attack on average people (6, 7). Diebel also includes a quote from a cybersecurity expert stating that one reason security questions are still used is because of convenience, instead of having good security (8). She

Open Document