If you usually take selfies making the peace sign, you might want to rethink it.
It appears that this innocent and well-intentioned habit could put your personal data at risk – if you fall onto a truly decisive hacker.
According to research by a team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII), cyber thieves can lift your fingerprints from selfies in order to access your data (such as the information you have on iPhone with the Touch ID system). But while this is technically possible, experts say there's no need to panic. The research focuses on the security threat to social media users who share a lot of images. Using a series of photos taken by a camera placed about three meters away from a person, the team was able to accurately recreate their fingerprints.
«By making the peace sign in front of a camera, your fingerprints can become widely available», said the NII researchers in the newspaper.
However, this breach via selfies is not something new. In 2014, the hacking group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) demonstrated the capabilities “fingerprint cloning” in a demo.
The good news, however, is that the process is not that easy. It is a complex multi-stage process, with molds and models required to recreate the thumb from the moment the image is found.
“If you look at 100 images of people, probably less than 30 percent have the correct lighting type to be used. Secondly, even if there is an image that serves this purpose, there is an entire science for someone to extract and print the correct scale with the correct format and then transfer it to a mold to achieve the desired result.”
