Fake Fingers Used To Fool Hospital Biometric Scanners

[HardOCP News]

This is definitely the technology FAIL story of the day. It's just too bad they didn't include any pictures of the fake fingers in the article.

Five doctors at a Brazilian hospital have been suspended after they were accused of covering for absentee colleagues by using fake silicone fingers with their prints to fool biometric machines.

 

[Kaitian]

They get paid by the hour? No salary?

 

[sviola]

This sort of fraud is quite common in Brazil.

 

[DragonNOA1]

I wonder what the name of the biometric system is that was fooled?

 

[Trepidati0n]

I wonder what the name of the biometric system is that was fooled?

Does not matter. If a human made it, a human can defeat it (e.g. make a better fake finger). Seriously, if you could make a $100k/year doing nothing..investing $20k into a fake is totally worth it.

 

[Jagger100]

Why I laugh at biometric security for electronics and credit/bank cards. All you do is put people themselves at risk.

Mythbusters hacked something up from a fingerprint. Imagine once people have weeks, months, or years to work up methods to defeat it. What it does is make the bad guys go after stuff with your prints on it or maybe even your finger.

 

[sviola]

Why I laugh at biometric security for electronics and credit/bank cards. All you do is put people themselves at risk.

Mythbusters hacked something up from a fingerprint. Imagine once people have weeks, months, or years to work up methods to defeat it. What it does is make the bad guys go after stuff with your prints on it or maybe even your finger.

Fingerprint biometrics and authentication is the easiest to fool biometrics. There are much harder ones, like vein matching and retinal scan that are much more difficult to fool and require the person there to do the authentication, as they require blood flow to autheticate.

But most important security can be improved by using multiple authentication methods (like a password + biometrics + pin for example would make a system muh more secure and probably not cost efficient for someone to break in).

 

[geok1ng]

They get paid by the hour? No salary?

Not exactly. They got a base salary for something like 12h/24h of work/week and receive extra by doing extra turns. These extra turns/shifts are the main source of income in brazilian public hospitals. On the fake finger city, a medical doctor would get USD600 for 24h of work on weekends. No wonder the only kind of doctor they could hire for these wages were fake silicon ones.

i used to take Intensive care turns on a public hospital about 7 years ago when the administration decided to start using a fingertip scan to control doctors and nurses. after the first month they called all the doctors and decided to stop controlling us, because turn shifts required us to come to work 15 minutes before the turn, but leaving the intensive care unit usually took us more than 30 minutes (up to 2h when patients were unstable), so after the fingertip scan the hospital was being forced to pay doctors overwork hours, which of course was unacceptable "the hospital administration has come to the conclusion that medical doctors do not need biometric scans