8 votes

Report: Data Breach in Biometric Security Platform Affecting Millions of Users

2 comments

  1. patience_limited
    Link
    Anyone with a BioStar 2 access system needs to change all administrative passwords immediately and re-enroll users, and preferably, add a physical key system for sensitive locations. It remains to...

    Anyone with a BioStar 2 access system needs to change all administrative passwords immediately and re-enroll users, and preferably, add a physical key system for sensitive locations.

    It remains to be seen how exploitable the leaked biometric data may be in the near term, but this is just a prime example of why biometrics shouldn't be used for authentication.

    There's no reliable means of calling those measurements back once they're in the wild; no one is going to be able to easily reset their fingerprints and faces. Even resampling to store a different selection of identifying data points won't provide sufficient protection; smoothing and 3-D extrapolation could provide an adequate facial or fingerprint map to reconstruct any missing data.

    VPNMentor's report suggests that system-wide user account information was stored in the same unencrypted, web-accessible ElasticSearch database as customer data - that's just unconscionable. Why the hell any of this data was stored unhashed/unencrypted is an excellent question, hopefully to be resolved by a ravening pack of lawyers hungry for sweet GDPR and other penalty money. I don't know that a data breach has actually bankrupted a company yet, but Suprema ought to suffer greatly.

    2 votes
  2. RapidEyeMovement
    Link
    I'm not in the security world but this doesn't seem like that long of a turn around time Can anyone comment?

    I'm not in the security world but this doesn't seem like that long of a turn around time

    Date discovered: 5th August 2019
    Date vendors contacted: 7th August 2019
    Date of Action: 13th August, the breach was closed

    Can anyone comment?

    2 votes