When you set up your NC State security questions and answers, you want to make sure that you are choosing quality questions and answers to help protect your account. These questions and answers are used to verify your identity when contacting the NC State Help Desk by phone and as part of the self-service password reset tool.  Visit the Edit Security Questions page to make any updates or changes.

Guidelines for Security Questions and Answers

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 be identified through your social media and other publicly available information.
• Stable: Do not change over time
  
  • Avoid choosing questions where the answer is a personal preference that may change.
  • 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
  • Your security question answers should be easy for you to remember, but they should be hard or impossible for anyone else to figure out.
• Simple: Are precise, easy, and consistent
  • Simple questions will have precise answers that will not cause any confusion days, weeks, or months after they have been set up.
• Many: Have many possible answers
  • Security questions should have many potential answers. Having many potential answers makes guessing the answer more difficult.
  • If one of your security questions only has a small subset of known possible answers, then it can be guessed within a few attempts.