When setting up your NC State Security questions and answers you want to ensure you are choosing quality questions and answers to help protect your account.  These questions and answers get used to verify your identity when contacting the help desk by phone or as part of our self-service account tools for password reset and 2FA Bypass.  Visit the Edit Security Questions page to make any updates or changes.

Good security questions and answers for your account will meet the following criteria.

Safe: Cannot be guessed or researched.

Questions and their answers should not be easily guessed or researched by others over the internet. Avoid using questions and answers that can quickly be identified through your social media or other publicly available information about you.

Stable: Does not change over time.

Avoid choosing questions where the answer is a personal preference. Questions relying on your preference may cause you to not remember what was set if your preference ever changes in the future.

Memorable: Can be easily remembered.

Should be easy for you to remember the answer but hard or impossible for anyone else to figure out.

Simple: Is precise, easy, and consistent.

A simple question has a precise answer that will not cause confusion days, weeks, or months later after it has been set up.

Many: Has many possible answers.

Security questions should have many potential answers.  This makes guessing the answer much more difficult. If the question has only a small subset of known possible answers then it can be guessed with only a few iterations.