Fingerprint security system | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

MasterCard has unveiled its brand new payment card that has a built-in biometric fingerprint scanner, allowing customers to authorize payments with their fingerprint, without requiring a PIN code or a signature. The company is already testing the new biometric payment cards, combined with the on-board chips, in South Africa and says it hopes to roll out the new cards to the rest of the world by the end of 2017. Don't Worry, It Still Supports PIN-based Transactions as Fallback Wait — If you think that this feature would not allow you to share your card with your child and spouse, don't worry — Mastercard has a solution for this issue as well. The company has confirmed that even if the card is configured to expect the fingerprint for authenticating a purchase, but it does still have a PIN as a fallback, in case, for some reason EMV readers fail to read fingerprint or you have yourself handed it to your child for shopping. Stores & Retailers Don't Need New Hardw

If you have watched the most recent Avengers movie, then you would be aware of a scene where all the superheroes Iron Man, War Machine, Hawkeye, and Captain America take turns to lift Thor's hammer but fail. Someone has an explanation, Why? Inspired by Thor's legendary hammer Mjolnir that is not liftable by anyone except Thor, an electrical engineer has built a real-life Mjolnir that only he can pick up. Electrical engineer Allen Pan , who also runs the Sufficiently Advanced YouTube channel, created a giant hammer that only he can lift, so long as the hammer is on a metal surface. To make his hammer immovable, Pan made use of: A capacitive touch sensor ( fingerprint sensor ) attached to the handle An Arduino Pro Mini and a solid state relay, which serves as a switching device. A microwave oven transformer electromagnet that uses electricity to produce a very strong magnetic field. The electromagnet creates a very strong magnetic field, strong enough

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The OPM Data Breach  ( Office of Personnel Management ) is getting even worse than we thought. We already know more than 21 Million current and former federal employees had their personal and highly sensitive private information hijacked in a massive data breach that affected Defense Department's OPM. But, now it has been revealed that the hackers have made off a lot more than just names, residential addresses, and social security numbers of the US government employees. And it's the unique and all time constant identity – The Fingerprints . 5.6 MILLLLLION Fingerprints Breached The US officials on Wednesday admitted that nearly 5.6 Million Fingerprints of its federal employees were also stolen in the massive data breach took place in April this year. The OPM, the US government agency that handles all federal employee data, had previously reported that some 1.1 Million Fingerprints were stolen. However, this figure has now been increased to 5.6 Million. L

Until today, there existed such Fingerprint Biometric Readers that required your touch to authenticate yourself as an authorized person. However, the latest research shows that the future of fingerprint scanners lies in a " no-touch " activity by an individual for gaining access. Recently, NIST ( National Institute of Standards and Technology ) has funded a number of startup and companies to develop touchless Fingerprint readers. The Contactless Biometric Technology requires the person's presence, but from meters away. As the fingerprint scanners can sense and read your fingerprint information while you are standing few meters away from the scanner. Contactless Fingerprint Scanners: Fast and Time Saving The touch-free technology is such where authentication is done with a faster speed, saving time while giving importance to hygiene when compared to conventional biometric devices. Imagine a situation, where there's a long queue and to pass through biometric fingerprint

Over a year ago I wrote an article on The Hacker News that warned of serious security concerns created by the iPhone and Android's Fingerprint authentication . Till now hackers were impersonated simply by lifting prints off the side of a phone and gaining unauthorized access to user's phone and thus data. However, security researchers have now discovered four new ways to attack Android devices to extract user fingerprints remotely without letting the user know about it. The attack, which the researchers dubbed the " Fingerprint Sensor Spying attack ," could be used by hackers to " remotely harvest fingerprints in a large scale, " Yulong Zhang, one of the researchers told ZDNet. Remotely Hacking Android Fingerprints FireEye researchers Tao Wei and Yulong Zhang presented their research in a talk titled, Fingerprints on Mobile Devices: Abusing and Leaking , at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, where they outlined new wa

Biometric security systems that involve person's unique identification (ID), such as Retinal, IRIS, Fingerprint or DNA, are still evolving to change our lives for the better even though the biometric scanning technology still has many concerns such as information privacy, and physical privacy. In past years, Fingerprint security system , which is widely used in different applications such as smartphones and judicial systems to record users' information and verify person's identity, were bypassed several times by various security researches, and now, IRIS scanner claimed to be defeated . Don't worry! It's not like how they do it in movies, where an attacker needs to pull authorized person's eye out and hold it in front of the eye scanner. Instead, now hackers have finally found a simple way to bypass IRIS Biometric security systems using images of the victims. The same security researcher Jan Krissler , nicknamed Starbug , from the famous Chaos Co