Voice biometrics: they can tell who you are and much, much more

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 05:51

IT Industry - Strategy

According to Magee major financial institutions in the US are "in lockstep to deploy voice biometrics...It is almost a natural first entry point," and the company in the past has said that, once one major Australian bank deploys the technology, others will quickly follow.

To promote the technology VeCommerce commissioned a survey from Callcentres.net into the general public's view on traditional means of authentication - passwords, PINs and predefined questions. About 200 people were interviewed in each of Australia and New Zealand in a rerun of a survey carried out in 2008.

According to VeCommerce, "the survey found that 67 percent of Australians are concerned about fraud and identity theft...An alarming 37 percent of the survey respondents had either experienced identity fraud or theft themselves or had a friend or family member who had fallen victim to these crimes."

VeCommerce said 45 percent of respondents favoured voice biometrics for identity verification, followed by PIN (21 percent), password (18 percent) and person details or personal history questions (16 percent).

Sixty seven percent of respondents were reported believing that their security details were at risk. They are right to fearful. Mark Goudie - managing principal of the investigative response team APAC at Verizon Business Security Solutions - told iTWire last month that, in 2008, Verizon Business had witnessed an explosion of attacks targeting PIN data and he said: "Every PIN breach we investigated was the result of a breach of the back end systems...and investigators found that PIN fraud typically leads to cash being withdrawn directly from the consumer's account."