Doctors Bypass Biometric Scanners With Fake Fingers 139
jfruh writes "At a Brazilian hospital, doctors were required to check in with a fingerprint scanner to show that they've showed up for work. Naturally, they developed a system to bypass this requirement, creating fake fingers so that they could cover for one another when they took unauthorized time off. Another good example of how supposedly foolproof security tech can in fact be fooled pretty easily."
An important reminder... (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition to being a reminder that the people with a hard-on for 'biometrics' are either morons(Here you go, you were born with only ten passwords, so don't lose them!) or primarily interested in surveillance and tracking, or both; this is a useful reminder that 'security' is a system of interlocking parts Not a product you buy from your Solutions Vendor(tm) and set-and-forget.
We have the one doctor, who was caught with the fake fingers, along with at least three others who were ghosting through their shifts. She claims that they leaned on her, threatened her job if she refused to help with the con, they probably claim that she was in on the con and was absent on other days. Regardless of which of those is true, how many other people at the hospital would be in the position to notice whether or not a doctor is present and doing stuff? Probably more than a few. The front-desk servitors had to know what patient flow looked like, restock requests for supplies in various exam rooms can't have looked right, there are a lot more details than the punch-card machine here. This hospital isn't so much suffering from a 'fingerprint scanners are oversold' problem; but a problem with either massive cheating and/or apathy toward cheating, or unaccountable abuse of authority to suppress people who could have blown the whistle.
Re:"supposedly foolproof security tech" (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd have to be a right fool to be unable to fool these things [slashdot.org]. As in the link, as here, the application has very little to do with security. It's a people problem, and you can't fix those solely with technology.
Worse, treating it as a technical problem and attacking it with security kit gives a strong signal to your own {doctors,pupils,*} that they're all criminals and need to be treated as such. This in turn creates a powerful incentive to game the system.
What we have here is an incompetent administration trying to fix their mess through shitting on their underlings some more, using technology. Underlings know and dislike this.
And so gaming the system is what they'll do. This quite apart from biometrics being inappropriate everywhere but in criminal forensics. Be careful what you ask for and all that.
Biometric system is insecure by design (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Retina Scanners... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Biometrics are not secrets. (Score:1, Interesting)