A speaker at a yearly hacking conference in Germany has claimed the ability to recreate someone’s fingerprints using just photographs of their fingers, as reported by the BBC.
This capability would highlight the compromised nature of replacing passwords with fingerprints, which is already seen by experts as far from fully secure.
In his talk at the Chaos Computer Club – Europe’s largest hacker organization – Jan Krissler said he used a high-profile target for his attempt: German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen.
Krissler, also known by the pseudonym “Starbug,” used several close-range photos from a “standard photo camera” of von der Leyen’s hand from a few angles before creating an image of her thumbprint via VeriFinger, a software program used to read fingerprints. (more…)
Take a moment and look at your hands. Specifically, compare the length of your ring finger to the one you use to point. Is the ring finger longer or shorter than your pointer, and by how much? It turns out that the answer to that question can tell a lot about your mental abilities and appetite for risk. As ConvergEx’s Nick Colas details, a 2009 study of mostly male traders working in London found that the ones with longer ring fingers were generally more profitable than those with shorter ones. Traders with the largest fourth finger/second (pointer) finger ratios actually made 11 times more than those with the smallest.