Security News
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Massive amounts of private data - including more than 300,000 biometric digital fingerprints used by five mobile banking apps - have been put at risk of theft due to hard-coded Amazon Web Services credentials, according to security researchers. In all, 77 percent of these apps contained valid AWS access tokens that allowed access to private AWS cloud services, the intelligence team noted in research published today.
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There are technological and expertise hurdles that a miscreant would have to clear today to track a person through the Bluetooth signals in their devices, they wrote. The researchers - who hail from the school's departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering - pointed to the applications governments added to Apple iOS and Android devices used in the COVID-19 pandemic that send out constant Bluetooth signals - or beacons - for contact-tracing efforts.
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Researchers have demonstrated a new type of fingerprinting technique that exploits a machine's graphics processing unit as a means to track users across the web persistently. A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint is information that is collected about the hardware, installed software, as well as the web browser and its associated add-ons from a remote computing device for the purpose of unique identification.
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According to the Kraken Security Labs team, there is a way to clone fingerprints using inexpensive materials, with no high-end tools involved in any step of the process. As the team demonstrated, stealing the fingerprint is a case of photographing it with any modern smartphone and then generating the negative on a photo manipulation software.
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A "Potentially devastating and hard-to-detect threat" could be abused by attackers to collect users' browser fingerprinting information with the goal of spoofing the victims without their knowledge, thus effectively compromising their privacy. Academics from Texas A&M University dubbed the attack system "Gummy Browsers," likening it to a nearly 20-year-old "Gummy Fingers" technique that can impersonate a user's fingerprint biometrics.
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Thales has announced what it claims is the "World's first" payment card to include an onboard fingerprint sensor, promising improved security and usability - and an end to contactless payment limits. The Thales Gemalto Biometric Sensor Payment card, the company explained, replaces the traditional PIN with an on-card fingerprint sensor and requires no modifications to existing point-of-sale payment terminals.
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HID Global announced the TouchChip TC series of capacitive fingerprint sensors has been awarded Level 1 certification by independent third-party testing house iBeta Quality Assurance. This conformance - conducted in accordance with ISO/IEC 30107-3 - affirms the HID Global biometric device functions to the highest standards, achieving 0% penetration during repeated test spoof attempts.
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Theme park operator Six Flags has agreed to pay $36 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its acquisition of the fingerprint data of visitors to its theme parks. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in the case Rosenbach v. Six Flags that collecting biometric data at premises' gates by scanning fingerprints of people who enter the company's theme park violates Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
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An advanced persistent threat that Russia found inside government systems was too crude to have been the work of a Western nation, says security researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade of Sentinel Labs, before suggesting the malware came from a Chinese entity. Russian telco and IT services provider Rostelecom and the nation's National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents, an arm of the Russian Federal Security Service, in May published a joint report that detailed their assessment of attacks on several Russian government entities detected in 2020.
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Following the renewal of an existing contract, IDEMIA will deliver INTERPOL's new identification system that will usher in enhanced capabilities such as higher matching accuracy and more user-friendly interfaces. This latest alliance further strengthens IDEMIA's 20-year relationship with INTERPOL. Collaboration began in 2000 when IDEMIA delivered the first Automated Fingerprint Identification System.