Biometric Data – How your Instagram post could be exposing it to criminals.

With social media being as integral to society as it has ever been, and the fast-growing improvements in technology, there is the rapidly growing risk that hackers will be able to steal biometric data from something as simple as a selfie.

In a recent study by TrendMicro, they looked into the #eyemakeup tag. They found that there is a large number of posts that had videos exposing iris patterns that pass eye scanners. This is one hashtag with over 2 billion views and 10 million posts.

This has become increasingly easier to fraud due to the quality that phone cameras now possess – for reference an iPhone 4 camera had a 0.4-megapixel camera, in just 10 years the iPhone 13 now possesses a 12-megapixel front camera.

And it’s not just iris’s that are at risk, by simply posting a video of your face and hand someone could determine your –

Ear shape – Facial structure – Voice – Palm – Fingerprints – Hand shape

Images supplied by Trend Micro

This kind of information can be used for a multitude of things – one of the scarier ones being deepfake software, luckily most people won’t be famous or important enough to be deep faked into anything malicious.

However, as AI improves and deepfake technology does as a result the chance of being a victim only increases.

‘Metadata on professional images can also give more information about a target, increasing the probability of a successful attack. Aside from social media, images are often released on corporate portals or news sites, and these images usually have specific details about the subjects in the photos.’ – TrendMicro

So, what can you do?

You cannot change your biometric data like you change a password, making it ever more important that you are careful with what you post. Lowering your image quality or blurring your features are the most effective ways however that defeats the purpose of social media.

2FA is one of the best ways to ensure that even if your biometric data is used for malicious intent, it isn’t going to be used to breach your account.

Genmar can help secure your account with our Multi Factor Authentication services that will ensure that only you are able to access your data.

https://genmar.co.uk/multi-factor-authentication/

Read TrendMicro’s 75-page study on this issue

Leaked Today, Exploited for Life: How Social Media Biometric Patterns Affect Your Future (trendmicro.com)