Gadgetory

hello and welcome to inside scoop I'm Sumi das joining me is senior writer for cnet Seth Rosenblatt Seth thanks for being with us I assuming okay so less than 48 hours after the iphone 5s went on sale on Friday it's already been hacked or at least a feature of it a new touch ID feature which is where you put your thumb on the home button it scans it accesses it gives you access to your phone so yes somebody has hacked this some Germans what happened yes so a group before the phone was even released to the public on Friday a couple of security researchers announced that they were going to run a contest to see if they could if anybody could hack the touch ID sensor which will work with any of your fingerprints okay and they started to start it off almost in a joking way on Twitter and then it became very serious when they decided that they were going to put up a website and actually start collecting the funds one law firm offered to put the funds into escrow and so things got serious pretty quickly and then everything escalated when one person offered ten thousand dollars as part of the reward they've since backed down but before the end of it the reward topped eleven thousand dollars in various currencies US dollars euros bitcoins now the whole thrown in there people were offering bottles of expensive alcohol and cheap alcohol right and there was a book of erotica being thrown in there was also a patent from the same law firm that was covering the funds in escrow I patent application so the person who came up with a successful hack would get an opportunity to patent it okay so erotica and bottles of alcohol aside i mean the money gives us this impression that people were taking it seriously and i'm sure so how did they do this yes so they wound up transferring a fingerprint and it's not clear from what they transferred it from so it's not sure we're not sure yet if it was from the iphone glass itself or from a beer stein or something but somehow they were they were able to transfer the fingerprint to a piece of latex okay and then put the latex over a second persons fingertip and then rub it against the home sensor the home button sensor and and that unlocked the phone and there's several videos demonstrating this we're still waiting for complete full instructions on how they did it how they did the fingerprint transfer but clearly it does work is this surprising that it happened so quickly you know the researchers say that they were surprised which is interesting they thought that it was going to take longer than it did to to hack the sensor and it didn't but to take away from that they said is is that you know there are always going to be ways to hack a security protocol no matter what what it is whether it's a pincode fingerprint sensor other biometrics but that there are also ways that you can things that you can do to take precautions to protect yourself this is I mean something that they did we don't know exactly how they got the original fingerprint to the copy of it so it seems like it's not that easy of a hack it seems like you have to go through some effort to get a picture of somebody's fingerprinting might be difficult it seems it can be again unfortunate we don't know precisely how the German hacker who pulled off the hack I was able to do this but even from his vague instructions other people were able to replicate it and then demonstrate that in videos on youtube so any response from Apple not yet Apple's not even responded alright will be interesting to see what they say and what should people do I have an iphone 5s should I be concerned because I actually really am enjoying the touch ID faster its feature it's so much faster mhm absolutely there's a couple things you could do one suggestion from the researchers is that you use a finger other than your index finger or your thumb so if you use your pinky or your ring finger to unlock the phone those fingerprints are very hard to lift from other surfaces there they're harder to get complete fingerprints of so if you if you wanted to continue using you wanted to be a little bit safer that's one thing you could do alright so good information Seth thanks so much thank you for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching