Prepare for trivia challenge

If you don’t remember your high school team mascot or the name of the street you grew up on, you had better figure it out quickly.

Sometime soon, when you access your bank or credit card or investment accounts online, you will be asked questions like these as part of new security measures being required for banks, credit unions, investment firms, mortgage lenders, credit card companies and other types of financial services firms nationwide.

So if you want to access your account online, be prepared to jump through a few new hoops.

The measures, adopted by all major government regulators such as the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are required by Jan. 1 because of mounting problems with identity theft.

Nearly half of adults, or about 90 million people, bank online.

Here’s how the process will work:

Once your bank launches its new security program, the Web site will automatically “ping” your specific computer and identify it through forensics, a cookie and other methods.

You will be asked to select three to five “challenge questions,” with answers that only you or someone really close to you would know. Forget your mother’s maiden name and the name of your pet; those are too easy. Your choices for questions might include the model of your first car, the name of your favorite teacher from school or the city where you honeymooned. It’s sort of like your own Trivial Pursuit game.

If you try to log in later from a different computer, you won’t be able to do it speedily, even with the correct user name and password. First, you will have to answer a few deep, dark personal questions. In some cases, the bank will call you on the phone to verify that it’s really you before allowing you to log in. In other cases, you will have to have your ATM card or credit card to log in. Or you might have a special authentication key fob that scrolls a new bank security code every 60 seconds. Enter the right one, along with your information, and you’re in.

Extra security measures will also be required when consumers access financial accounts by phone.