The Latest in IT Security

Photographs are turning into the digital equivalent of fingerprints, allowing law enforcement to search through a collection of images to help track down the identity of photo-taking criminals, such as smartphone thieves and child pornographers. Prior investigation has shown that a digital photo can be paired with the very camera that took it by examining the unique noise pattern that its sensor imprints onto photos, and now researchers have begun applying that to social networks, grabbing photos from Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, and personal blogs to see whether one individual image could be matched to a specific users account. The researchers, Riccardo Satta and Pasquale Stirparo from the European Commissions Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen, acknowledge that this performance is far from perfect, but they argue that its still much better than random guess and could at the least help to pinpoint persons of interest in a criminal investigation.