Theft of biometric database: How dangerous can it be?

In its long decade of control over Afghanistan, the US military composed a huge biometric database with about 25 million entries. It was done in an attempt to track terrorists. However, after their withdrawal from the country, it is being reported that this database might be in the hands of the Taliban and they can use it in their own favor. It has the potential to bring great danger to cybersecurity. The primary purpose of this database was in military operations, but it also had records of afghani citizens who worked in the US embassies. It also included information about the coalition of US allies. The biometric information that could be on file for those people varies: the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) used by the military collects everything from iris scans to fingerprints, along with identifying biographical information, according to the sources The Intercept spoke to. Those devices are now reportedly in the Taliban's possession.

Basics of Biometric Devices

Biometric devices are for "authentication and verification" of an individual with the help of the unique, measurable, and biological trait of that individual. Biometric is a tremendously growing facility. Today biometric authentication and verification systems come in various forms, it can be fingerprint biometric, physiological biometric, DNA matching, iris recognition, voice–speaker identification, and so on.

How Cybersecurity Can be Threatened by the Theft of Biometrics

Today attempts to bypass data security events look like efforts to bypass the impossible thing. Notwithstanding the concern of data security efforts falling short, they have to be used. Information systems carrying a lot of biometric data of students, employees, or citizens are a possible target of cyber-criminals. Theft of biometric data can be ruinous. Unlike passwords, biometric identifiers of an individual cannot be changed if compromised. If a criminal can create a pattern out of biometric templates, people can lose their biometric identity permanently, and this is a cybersecurity threat.

Confusion arises about how the Taliban would use that database as some of the US militaries state that the Taliban do not have the proper gear to use this database and on the other hand, sources like Reuters and local reports said the Taliban has used government biometric data in the last five years to "target members of the security forces, checking their fingerprints against a database," which only clouds things further. However, the possibility of widespread abuse of the collected data makes evading biometric scanning and securing civilians' digital identities all the more important. To handle this situation, the Human rights organization has published guides on biometric recognition and protecting digital identities in English, Farsi, and Pashto for people to understand and protect their information.