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 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

Permissions in SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft 365 are remarkably precise. They spell out exactly which users have access to which data sets. The terminology differs between apps, but each user's base permission is determined by their role, while additional permissions may be granted based on tasks or projects they are involved with. Layered on top of that are custom permissions required by an individual user.  For example, look at a sales rep who is involved in a tiger team investigating churn while also training two new employees. The sales rep's role would grant her one set of permissions to access prospect data, while the tiger team project would grant access to existing customer data. Meanwhile, special permissions are set up, providing the sales rep with visibility into the accounts of the two new employees. While these permissions are precise, however, they are also very complex. Application admins don't have a single screen within these applications th

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