biometric data | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has issued a final rule carrying out Executive Order (EO) 14117, which prevents mass transfer of citizens' personal data to countries of concern such as China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. "This final rule is a crucial step forward in addressing the extraordinary national security threat posed of our adversaries exploiting Americans' most sensitive personal data," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "This powerful new national-security program is designed to ensure that Americans' personal data is no longer permitted to be sold to hostile foreign powers, whether through outright purchase or other means of commercial access." Back in February 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order to address the national security risk posed by unauthorized access to Americans' sensitiv...

Researchers have uncovered a potential means to profile and track online users using a novel approach that combines device identifiers with their biometric information. The details come from a newly published research titled "Nowhere to Hide: Cross-modal Identity Leakage between Biometrics and Devices" by a group of academics from the University of Liverpool, New York University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and University at Buffalo SUNY. "Prior studies on identity theft only consider the attack goal for a single type of identity, either for device IDs or biometrics," Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Assistant Professor at the University of Liverpool, told The Hacker News in an email interview. "The missing part, however, is to explore the feasibility of compromising the two types of identities simultaneously and deeply understand their correlation in multi-modal IoT environments." The researchers presented the findings at the Web Conference 2020 held...

When people think of cybersecurity threats, they often picture external hackers breaking into networks. However, some of the most damaging breaches stem from within organizations. Whether through negligence or malicious intent, insiders can expose your organization to significant cybersecurity risks. According to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report , 57% of companies experience over 20 insider-related security incidents a year, with human error involved in 68% of data breaches. With that, insider attacks result in the highest costs, averaging USD 4.99 million per attack, as per the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security.  What are insider threats? An insider threat originates from within an organization – it's the potential for anyone with authorized access to your critical systems to misuse their access, harming your organization. The worst part is that insiders are already within your IT perimeter and are familiar with your internal security prot...

Why would someone bother to hack a so-called "ultra-secure encrypted database that is being protected behind 13 feet high and 5 feet thick walls," when one can simply fetch a copy of the same data from other sources. French security researcher Baptiste Robert, who goes by the pseudonym "Elliot Alderson" on Twitter, with the help of an Indian researcher, who wants to remain anonymous, discovered that the official website of popular state-owned LPG gas company Indane is leaking personal details of its millions of customers, including their Aadhaar numbers. This is not the first time when an unprotected third-party database has leaked Aadhaar details of Indian citizens, which is a unique number assigned to each citizen as part of India's biometric identity programme maintained by the government's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Earlier this week an anonymous Indian researcher initially discovered a loophole in the Indane's online...

Forget fingerprint authentication, retinal scanning or advanced facial recognition that has recently been implemented by Apple in its iPhone X—researchers developed a new authentication system that doesn't require any of your interaction, as simply being near your device is more than enough. A group of computer scientists at the University of Buffalo, New York, have developed a new cardiac-scan authentication system that uses your heart's shape and size as a unique biometric to identify and authenticate you. Dubbed Cardiac Scan , the new authentication system makes use of low-level Doppler radar to wirelessly and continuously map out the dimensions of your beating heart, granting you access to your device so long as you're near it. In simple words, your office device should be able to recognise that it is you sitting in front of the computer, and sign you in without any password or interaction, and automatically should log you out if you step away from your compute...

WikiLeaks has just published another Vault 7 leak, revealing how the CIA spies on their intelligence partners around the world, including FBI, DHS and the NSA, to covertly collect data from their systems. The CIA offers a biometric collection system—with predefined hardware, operating system, and software—to its intelligence liaison partners around the world that helps them voluntary share collected biometric data on their systems with each other. But since no agency share all of its collected biometric data with others, the Office of Technical Services (OTS) within CIA developed a tool to secretly exfiltrate data collections from their systems. Dubbed ExpressLane , the newly revealed CIA project details about the spying software that the CIA agents manually installs as part of a routine upgrade to the Biometric system. The leaked CIA documents reveal that the OTS officers, who maintain biometric collection systems installed at liaison services, visit their premises and se...