The Weekly Cypher is curated to keep you up-to-date on the latest in biometric and cybersecurity news. Here are a few headlines you may have missed this week.
LG unveils dual-screen 5G smartphone and touts biometric breakthrough |Reuters
LG has launched its G8ThingQ phone, which can be unlocked without touching the screen through light sensors which scan the user’s hand veins or recognize their face. The phone’s front-facing camera, using a sensor chip developed by Germany’s Infineon Technologies, can scan in three dimensions. LG product evangelist David Montanya told a launch event it would be harder to ‘spoof’ than Apple’s iPhone X FaceID feature because the vein structure in a user’s hand has less than one chance in a billion of being the same as anyone else’s.
Facial recognition tech spots imposter traveling through JFK |Find Biometrics
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has used facial recognition technology to capture an imposter trying to enter the country through John F. Kennedy airport in New York. According to CBP, the imposter was a 26-year-old woman traveling from Mexico City who presented a US passport when she arrived at JFK.
Chinese tech companies are developing swine facial recognition technology |Business Times
As a response to the African swine epidemic, a handful of Chinese tech companies are working alongside the Chinese government in order to develop a technology that will allow them to map the facial features of a pig. Once this new technology is implemented, experts believe that it will be able to help them determine early swine diseases by using a pig’s facial expressions.
Terrorists and politicians exposed by Dow Jones data leak |IT Pro
A Dow Jones watchlist of “high risk” individuals and corporate entities has been inadvertently leaked to the public, thanks to an incorrectly configured and unsecured Elasticsearch database. The database was discovered by Bob Diachenko, an independent security researcher, who said that the list was sitting on a public database and available for public access to anyone who knew where to look. The watchlist in question is a database of individuals and companies that Dow Jones considers high-risk, which in this case, refers to their potential links to terrorism or organized crime.
Adoption families in Kent County experiencing data breach |BBC News
Contact details of hundreds of adoptive parents have been disclosed in a council email, and “human error” was blamed for the email from Kent County Council’s adoption service being sent to some 300 adoptive parents and some support workers. While the authority has pledged to improve security procedures and its data-protection team has begun an investigation, parents have voiced fears their data could fall into the wrong hands.
