Marcus Chavers of Newsledge did a really nice, concise job of de-bunking the fear mongering around the “hack” of the German Defense Minister’s fingerprint image.
Marcus writes …
Before we have the collective CNN-style freakout, there are some serious caveats to this. One, it doesn’t always work. It takes more than a few high quality images of a person’s hands. The easiest targets are celebrities and politicians, who have thousands of photos snapped of them.
Even then, have fun going through that archive. For the average person? Well, if you’re in line and someone has a Nikon DSLR pointed at your hand, you’re apt to say something or call the cops.
Two, they still need your phone. All that fingerprint work is for naught if the identity thief doesn’t have your phone. What’s the likelihood a Defense Minister is getting his/her phone stolen? About as likely as the thief getting access to it before it’s remote wiped.
And three. The practical danger of this is pretty limited. No one is going to get away with snapping pictures of your hand at Walmart. Then following you out to the parking lot to steal your phone. There’s easier ways to steal your identity. Seeing as online e-commerce is slow on patching vulnerabilities, just wholesale hacking Staples is easier than stealing 1000s of thumbprints.
Nothing more to say. Well done Marcus, well done!