What are the OPM hackers going to do with 1 million fingerprints?

American Thinker ^ | 07/16/2015 | Rick Moran

[SeekAndFind]

That's an excellent question that national security experts can't answer. And that has them worried sick.

Hacking social security numbers and passwords is one thing. But fingerprints are biometrics - they can't be changed and could open doors to hackers that would normally be closed to them.

National Journal:

Though the idea of hacked fingerprints conjures up troubling scenarios gleaned from Hollywood's panoply of espionage capers, not much is currently known about those that OPM said were swiped in the data breach, which began last year and has been privately linked by officials to China. In fact, the agency said it didn't even know yet specifically which personnel have had their prints compromised.

"We do not have that information at this time," said Sam Schumach, an OPM spokesman, explaining that the agency is still assessing the breach and has not yet performed a "deep dive" into the data to assess whose fingerprints are now in the hands of hackers.

Questions also remain about what the ultimate goal of the OPM hackers is, and the administration so far continues to refuse to publicly blame China for the intrusion. Some have likened the breach to an enormous surveillance operation, one that Beijing conducted in order to build databases on the ins and out of the U.S. government and to potentially coerce, blackmail, or bribe officials into divulging closely guarded secrets.

Whatever the motives, the stolen fingerprints are viewed as a uniquely important and unprecedented data heist—one that could reap huge rewards for the hackers for decades to come.

"It's really horrifying, on so many levels," said Peter Singer, a strategist at the New America Foundation and a consultant for the military who just published a book, Ghost Fleet, that imagines what a cyber-heavy 21st-century war

[Flintlock]

How hard is it to make a latex ‘fingerprinting’ fake finger from digital data?

..........and then USE IT?

Just asking.

[IncPen]

What was Hillary going to do with 900 FBI files?

[jagusafr]

I haven’t gotten the letter yet - maybe that means they weren’t as successful as feared?

[Gaffer]

Well.....suppose I was an agent that had an official cover identity and passport.

The passport has a digital fingerprint (probably the agent’s real one) that could be scanned overseas and checked against oh, say, a database of some sort that had a million real names and the finger prints? It doesn’t take much to figure out something is very bad wrong with that picture.

[SpaceBar]

Blackmail and espionage. Thug wearing special gloves made by a Chicom military laboratory breaks into a Manhattan apartment, rapes and murders the occupant. A few hours later, police are perp-walking a politician ‘forensically linked’ to the crime.