Sunday, July 29, 2007

What body part next

We are entering a dawn of new "body part" recognition era of security measures. This week I read an article about vein patterns as an alternative to finger prints. Is this a step in the right direction - or not? Or is this just a lazy way of trying to secure your information?

The traditional way - full disk encryption - is just to hard for the average home computer user. And, it seems, also the corporate world! Most people don't require full disk encryption, but even encrypting the files that hold their secure information seems to big a hurdle for most to
jump. Unless their software is set to auto update, most users won't even download security patches. Why - because I think they are unaware of the consequences. Even with the increased media coverage of Identity Theft, password stealing, and other security related issues, most users just do not realise the dangers they face. They still open attachments and click on anything and everything they see.

But now they can purchase laptops with fingerprint ID, or hardware attachments for their PC that perform the same task. Easy isn't it? And what are the risks? Many of you would have read the story of an armed gang of four who kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers, then tortured him for a stupid game password. Yes, I know it happened in Brazil. It could never happen [insert your country's name] here. Could it?

If the stakes are high enough, so are the risks.

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