There is more to your biometric data than its use in verifying your identity. Financial institutions are looking to biometric systems to protect their valued clients from the growing landscape of cyber attacks.
The concept of biometric remains a work in progress, but this early many institutions are seeking to implement its various applications. For example, JPMorgan Chase – which recently disclosed a massive data breach – wants to secure its clients by implementing a recorded voice message as gateway for customers to carry out transactions.
The technology that we are talking about is called voice-printing. Instead of authenticating your claim to your identity upon logging in, the system works to detect fraudulent users who would attempt to breach the biometric system using a fake voice message.
The question that immediately pops up in your mind might probably be: how did the banks obtain your unique voice message? By no means through secret monitoring. Remember the moment when you called up their customer service and before the conversation proper started, you heard a prompt that said your conversation with the other line was being recorded.
More popular forms of biometric are fingerprint scanning and iris scanning. Voice recognition technologies might be novel, but no less innovative when we speak of its ability to escalate the level of protection for users and enterprises. That is so because unlike fingerprints, it would be hard for hackers to imitate a human’s original voice. Which perhaps explains why some large financial institutions are turning to it. Other industries will do good to follow as well.
We have reported with a seemingly endless frequency on various cybersecurity issues, and the mostly targeted industry includes finance and retail. Cyber attacks against these sectors happen everyday, some in minor attacks, and when the circumstance permits, large attacks also happen. The rising adoption of biometric security might be of great help for these institutions to mitigate or avoid future attacks from successfully stealing sensitive data.
Of course there would some groups who would raise arguments against this biometric system for its privacy implications. But admit it, it is so far one of the most effective measures to counter fraud anywhere in cyber space. Definitely, voice biometric is the next big thing in security. This early, banks are seeing tremendous decrease in pilot tests conducted to assess the efficacy of this form of security method.
This is on top of the existing security measures that we as individual users implement as part of our own responsibility to stay secure online.
