The data hosting company Colocation America pitched facial recognition as a potential solution to data breaches in a recent post on its company blog. In the post, Colocation America explained that data breaches can often be attributed to one of three reasons, each of which can be addressed with better biometric security practices.
The first of those three reasons is fairly straightforward. Many companies have simply failed to upgrade their security protocols, even as hackers have become more sophisticated and data breaches have become more common. Data centers with lax authentication standards are attractive targets for cybercriminals, but the adoption of strong biometric authentication can make it much more difficult to get through the door.
The other two reasons concern employee incompetence and/or malfeasance. In some cases, poorly employees who don’t know what to look for will unknowingly click on phishing links and give hackers access to a company’s network. In others, an employee can be bribed to grant that access willingly.
In both cases, Colocation America recommends that large organizations restrict access to sensitive materials, and use facial recognition (with liveness detection) to verify the identity of anyone trying to view those materials. Even if an employee does fall prey to a phishing scam, those facial recognition checkpoints will limit the amount of data available to hackers once they get inside, which will discourage both the hackers and the employees who might abet them.
Of course, Colocation America is hardly the first company to highlight the security benefits of biometric technology. A 2018 Veridium survey found that companies are more likely to turn to biometrics after experiencing a data breach, while FindBiometrics has also released a new white paper explaining how biometric technology and liveness detection can reduce the threat of data breaches.
However, it is worth noting that there are flaws with facial recognition technology, and many of the systems currently in use are still vulnerable to spoofing attacks.
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November 18, 2019 – by Eric Weiss
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