AVISIAN Publishing – publishers of re:ID magazine and SecureIDNews — is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Women in Biometrics Identity 2015 awards. The awards were presented at the Borderpol North American Meeting on Sept. 10 at the DuPont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C. The judges ultimately selected five awardees from more than 50 nominations received.

Gemalto’s Breach Level Index reports 888 data breaches in the first half of 2015, compromising 245.9 million records worldwide. This is up 10% from the first half of 2014. The number
of breaches was flat compared with the last six months of 2014 that saw 892 breaches but increased by 10% compared to the 803 data breaches in first half of 2014.

Swipe your payment card and then take a selfie as an additional authentication factor? This is MasterCard’s plan as pilots are rolling out. While other are trying to remove friction from the authentication process, the payments giant seems to be adding it to take advantage of the selfie craze.

HID and Microsoft talk about “tapping” for access to cloud apps, Zvetco unveils fingerprint biometric safe, TeleSign launches unified API for two-factor authentication, LEGIC adds Bodet to ID network.

For some time, we’ve been aware of the long list of issues that comes with using passwords as an authentication mechanism, including poor usability, expensive maintenance and vulnerability to server breaches. Despite this, there hasn’t been a particularly compelling authentication technology that could serve as a viable replacement for passwords.

Goode Intelligence’s latest research identifies that the rapid adoption of biometrics on mobile and wearable devices will deliver frictionless authentication and identity verification services across the banking industry. The consultancy forecasts that by 2020, there will be more than 620 million mobile banking app downloads that support biometrics for customer authentication and transaction verification.

HID Global releases biometric and contactless ID card reader; VOXX buys biometric vendor EyeLock; Usher is FIDO certified; New print module from Entrust Datacard.