The Weekly Cypher is specially curated to keep you up-to-date on the latest in cybersecurity, biometrics, and related news and innovations. Here are a few of the headlines you might have missed this week:
Facebook Tests Facial Recognition for Account Recovery | The Verge
Most people have experienced the frustration of being locked out of their Facebook accounts. In response, Facebook has started testing another way to access your account: Using your face. This feature will be used alongside two-factor authentication as part of the account recovery process. Although it will be convenient for users, it’ll be interesting to see if Facebook manages to avoid the well-documented security pitfalls of facial recognition. [Read More]
Fingerprint Sensor Market to Near $13 Billion by 2023 | MarketResearch.com
A report by BIS Research revealed that the global market for fingerprint sensors will reach $12.8 billion by 2023. According to the report, China and India are the fastest-growing adopters of the technology. Additionally, although capacitive sensors have the largest market share, the report’s authors predict that optical sensors will experience the fastest growth between 2017 and 2023. [Read More]
Finger Vein Payment System Now Used in British Supermarket | eSellerCafé
Costcutter, a British market chain, has a location in London that has started using finger vein authentication for payments. Fingerprints are convenient for biometric authentication, but they do come with security issues – ones that finger vein authentication manages to address. It’s harder to co-opt finger veins than fingerprints because an infrared scanner has to capture the vein pattern, meaning that an image of the finger is insufficient for authentication. [Read More]
US Senate Committee Demands Answers from Yahoo and Equifax | Recode
Yahoo recently revealed that all 3 billion of its users were affected in a 2013 hack, and Equifax’s leak over the summer exposed over 145 million people’s information. As a result, the Senate Commerce Committee is bringing in executives from both companies to testify on Capitol Hill. The committee’s chairman, Senator John Thune, said that the goal is to find out whether there were any preventative security measures the companies could have taken, along with whether there is “more bad news to come.” [Read More]
Cybersecurity is Not a Device | Forbes
A company’s digital framework and data should be secure, but what exactly does that mean? Security frameworks are complex, and determining whether a company is secure isn’t as simple as examining what devices they have or which standards they comply with. David Lefever, the CEO of a cyber risk management firm, clarifies what it means for an organization to be secure, along with what it doesn’t mean – specifically that there’s no one device that makes you secure. [Read More]
