Kuwaiti police have busted a fraud ring specializing in fingerprint spoofing.
Eleven individuals have been arrested for allegedly using silicon-based forged fingerprints to defraud the Ministry of Electricity and Water in multiple districts. The alleged fraudsters are said to have been using the fake fingerprints to withdraw employee compensation in the amount of KD 50, or about $165 USD, per fingerprint set, per month.
It’s an example of the dangers of relying exclusively on standard fingerprints for authentication without adequate liveness detection. While fingerprints are almost unarguably more secure than passwords, and definitely more efficient, some systems are susceptible to this kind of forgery. As seen in our Year in Review, there is still a strong need for innovation in liveness detection.
That’s why some companies are starting to look into multimodal solutions and innovative fingerprint solutions that require liveness. There also appears to be a growing interest among the financial services community—particularly with respect to mobile applications—in eye-based authentication, which is theoretically harder to spoof. These kinds of solutions should help to prevent this kind of fraud as biometric authentication increases in popularity.
Source: Gulf Digital News
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December 16, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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