Doctors Bypass Biometric Scanners With Fake Fingers

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."

Comments

Re:"supposedly foolproof security tech"

[Let's All Be Chinese]

You'd have to be a right fool to be unable to fool these things. 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.