Tag Archive for: startup

Android Users Could Finally Have Face ID-Like Security Tech Thanks To This Startup


Apple has offered Face ID on iPhones for a few years and its security is fool-proof enough for the company to completely stop having the Touch ID. The situation with Android phones has been different, as people tend to feel safer with the biometric finger sensor than the software-enabled face unlock feature.

But we could finally have a breakthrough thanks to this one startup which has joined hands with one of the biggest mobile brands to make the security tech affordable and ready for mass adoption.

The startup named Metalenz based in Harvard Labs has partnered with Samsung and talked about Polar ID which is likely to be the Face ID rival and finally a secure facial recognition tech for Android users. Samsung’s role in its development is the use of the ISOCELL Vizion 931 sensor from the company.

Metalenz has claimed that Polar ID is the ideal tool ready to be deployed at a mass level as the tech is said to be smaller, affordable yet secure than the face unlock feature that works on your Android phone, which is very easy to believe.

So what makes Polar ID safer than the existing tech features?

Metalenz has a facial authentication tech that is claimed to capture the unique signature of each user, something that Apple also offers with Face ID on iPhones. Having secure facial tech will be crucial because people tend to use the feature for making payments and the future of passkeys makes it an even more pivotal part of the setup.

Samsung is offering the sensor that has been paired with the security tech, and having a giant in its wing means you can have the cost of economies in play, allowing more brands to tap into the feature and bring it to more users.

It has been mentioned that Android phones could see Polar ID tech available by the second half of 2024, which might make it mainstream by next year. We’ll be eager to test the feature and see how it stacks up against Face ID. Having said that, Metalenz sees the tech going beyond security and maybe even part of the mixed reality ecosystem.

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    The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry


    If you’re looking for a long read to while away your weekend, we’ve got you covered. First up, WIRED senior reporter Andy Greenberg reveals the wild story behind the three teenage hackers who created the Mirai botnet code that ultimately took down a huge swath of the internet in 2016. WIRED contributor Garrett Graff pulls from his new book on UFOs to lay out the proof that the 1947 “discovery” of aliens in Roswell, New Mexico, never really happened. And finally, we take a deep dive into the communities that are solving cold cases using face recognition and other AI.

    That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy stories we didn’t report in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

    For years, mercenary hacker companies like NSO Group and Hacking Team have repeatedly been the subject of scandal for selling their digital intrusion and cyberespionage services to clients worldwide. Far less well-known is an Indian startup called Appin that, from its offices in New Delhi, enabled customers worldwide to hack whistleblowers, activists, corporate competitors, lawyers, and celebrities on a giant scale.

    In a sprawling investigation, Reuters reporters spoke to dozens of former Appin staff and hundreds of its hacking victims. It also obtained thousands of its internal documents—including 17 pitch documents advertising its “cyber spying” and “cyber warfare” offerings—as well as case files from law enforcement investigations into Appin launched from the US to Switzerland. The resulting story reveals in new depth how a small Indian company “hacked the world,” as Reuters writes, brazenly selling its hacking abilities to the highest bidder through an online portal called My Commando. Its victims, as well as those of copycat hacking companies founded by its alumni, have included Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Malaysian politician Mohamed Azmin Ali, targets of a Dominican digital tabloid, and a member of a Native American tribe who tried to claim profits from a Long Island, New York, casino development on his reservation.

    The ransomware group known as Scattered Spider has distinguished itself this year as one…

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    How Christina Cacioppo Built Startup Vanta Into A $1.6 Billion Unicorn To Automate Complicated Security Compliance Issues


    The Stanford graduate built a fast-growing software company to automate what had previously been a manual process. She’s now one of America’s richest self-made women.


    About five years ago, Vanta CEO and cofounder Christina Cacioppo received a message from one of the customers of her nascent security and compliance automation company that something was wrong. The automated email the customer received each morning detailing what had happened in their Vanta account in the past 24 hours had the wrong company name in it. Cacioppo responded: “There’s a bug, we’re so sorry. We’ll fix it.”

    What the customer didn’t realize was that the “automated” email was actually one that Cacioppo had sent early that morning. Cacioppo, who had founded Vanta just months earlier, set her alarm each day for 5:45 a.m. and crafted the emails by hand. She did this to make sure customers liked the emails before spending time writing code that would automate them. Once she knew what customers wanted, she and Vanta’s founding team sat down and wrote the code—and didn’t need to change it for a year and a half.

    It’s just one example of the Ohio native’s scrappy approach—which also included everything from buying coffee in bulk from Costco to running Vanta without formal executive or staff meetings for its first two years. That hustle has helped her company land an estimated 5,000 customers including Quora, Autodesk and payments software firm Modern Treasury, with 600 new customers signing up each quarter, according to Vanta. Cacioppo has also helped score $203 million in funding to date from such venture capital firms as Craft Ventures and Sequoia, including $110 million raised in June 2022 that values the company at $1.6 billion. That’s enough to earn Cacioppo, 36, a spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a $385 million fortune based on her stake in Vanta.

    “Prior to Vanta, the way security and compliance was done was entirely with spreadsheets and screenshots of information that were collected in folders and shown to [certified…

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    Layered Security Introduction (Cyber Security Part 4)