Selfie fingerprint scam is real, some AI experts warn others say its bunk: Stuff out of spy novels

Siege of the selfie?Panic is building amid social media claims that hackers can now use AI to extract fingerprints from posted pics of people innocently flashing peace signs.The alarm seems to have originated from a Chinese television segment that aired this April.The clip in question features financial expert Li Chang demonstrating how taking a peace-sign selfie could leave you vulnerable to hackers who could steal your prints and use them for identity theft, phishing attacks, and to gain access to personal accounts.The segment showed fingerprint ridges becoming visible after the image was enhanced with photo-editing software and AI tools.Chang emphasized the danger, explaining that while passwords can be changed or reset, biometric data such as fingerprints and voice cannot, leaving victims permanently vulnerable.“The threat is real, underappreciated, and accelerating,” Bryan Lopez, a cybersecurity and AI technology leader at Microsoft, told Newsweek.

“What previously required forensic laboratory resources is now within reach of motivated, non-specialist actors,” he continued.While rare, there have been incidents of fingerprints being pulled from pictures.In 2014, hacker Jan Krissler — also known, inexplicably, as “Starbug” — announced that he used a close-up photo of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s thumb, along with other images taken from various angles during a press event, to recreate her fingerprint.“High-resolution cameras now capture sufficient fingerprint ridge detail that AI-assisted reconstruction tools can produce workable biometric templates from social media images,” said Lopez.

While pulling prints is theoretically possible, other experts maintain it is improbable.“This sounds like the stuff out of spy novels or ‘Mission Impossible’,” Vyas Sekar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CBS News.According to Sekar, to execute the scam, a hacker would...