Others are experimenting with different types of security features, such as Microsoft’s iris scanner. It would be interesting to see what direction the industry heads in eventually, and whether the different manufacturers are going to converge to a single group of technologies or if everyone will do their own thing.
Diversity and standardization are both important, especially when it comes to security, so it’s hard to say what attitude every company will have towards these issues. It wouldn’t be surprising to see some pooling their efforts in order to create something even tougher and more secure in the long run.
For now, those relying on their fingerprint scanner as a strong barrier on their devices should probably reconsider and move towards more traditional security measures like a passcode. Fingerprints will probably become effective enough to be used as a security measure in the future, but we are still not quite there yet.
Plus, this report only talks about this particular type of fingerprint scanner, but there is no guarantee that others aren’t affected as well. It’s also entirely possible that hackers out there already know of security exploits in the physical protection of other devices/mobile operating systems, but are intentionally keeping this information to themselves to that they can exploit it for longer. This is part of the problem in information security, and it will only keep getting more serious as we move into the future.