A web server containing records of about 76,000 unique fingerprints was left exposed on the internet, researchers said Wednesday. The unsecured fingerprint data, as well as employee email addresses and telephone numbers, had been collected by Brazilian company Antheus Tecnologia.
The database, which contained nearly 2.3 million data points, most of which were server access logs, has now been secured, according to Anurag Sen, the researcher who published his findings with antivirus review site Safety Detectives. The fingerprint data was stored as a binary data stream, which is a string of ones and zeroes. Sen said bad actors may be able to turn that data back into a biometric image of a fingerprint.
