Behavioral biometrics

The jury is out on whether the humble alphanumeric password is dead, but the popularity of ‘123456’, ‘password’ and ‘qwerty’ doesn’t exactly breed confidence. Cue biometrics, in the form of a fingerprint sensor on an iPhone to power Apple Pay. But such ‘static’ biometrics is last year’s tech…

The number of firms using multifactor authentication either for employees or customers leaped this year, according to a new research report.

Traditional authentication methods are struggling to keep up with the expansion of online services. Yet additional systems like two-factor authentication can prove to be cumbersome.

There’s a vision of a future where employees and customers don’t even have to enter a password and if they do it can be a simple one – password1234. These people envision a world of adaptive authentication. These systems take multiple attributes — IP address, geo-location of mobile device, time of accessing data, etc. – and then make a decision on whether or not to enable access.

IBM is diving into the emerging field of behavioral biometrics with new upgrade for its digital banking security system. Called IBM Security Trusteer Pinpoint Detect, the system now uses machine learning to build profiles of how users interact with their devices.

We’ve known for a long while that passwords, firewalls and private networks simply aren’t sufficient for tight IT security anymore. It’s all too easy for even a semi-sophisticated cyber-criminal to scan for passwords and find back doors into personal and business data that, sooner or later, amount to illicit money in the thief’s bank account. Thus, the race is on to develop workable alternatives, with behavioral biometrics one of the more promising ones.

As fraudsters continually refine their techniques to steal banking customers’ credentials, IBM fights back with new tools that use behavioral biometrics and cognitive fraud detection. IBM’s Brooke Satti Charles offers a preview.

Ecg biometric technology and other security insights with ben carter b-secur…