A Samsung Galaxy S10 bug that allows user to unlock the phone with any fingerprint is spooking WeChat Pay and Alipay into taking countermeasures.
WeChat Pay and Alipay, the most popular payment methods in Chinese people's daily life, have both banned payment authentication on Samsung’s Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones, with users on online forums reporting that they are unable to use this feature.
Bank of China, one of China’s biggest commercial banks, have also suspended features that allow user to log into its app on the Galaxy S10 and Tab S6 devices before WeChat Pay and Alipay.
Beside in China, Some Redditors are also reporting that certain banks in the UK are removing their apps from Galaxy S10 phones or are blocking the fingerprint authentication method on them.
NatWest and Nationwide Building Society banks in the UK have apparently taken action to prevent misuse of fingerprint logins on Galaxy S10 phones.
While NatWest has removed its banking app from the Play Store on Galaxy S10 devices, Nationwide Building Society has disabled fingerprint authentication.
The move isn’t limited to UK banks as per a Reddit user from Israel, an Israeli banking institution has also disabled the fingerprint authentication option for Galaxy S10 users.
So far, however, no U.S. bank has implemented any such measures.
This was all due to a bug recently found by a British woman.
As cnTechPost reported last week, a 34 year-old woman was shocked to discover one of those dirt-cheap screen protectors you can buy on eBay somehow totally broke the fingerprint authentication security on her state-of-the-art Galaxy S10.
Galaxy S10 bug lets any fingerprint unlock it, a South Korean bank issues warning
The issue is serious enough to prompt South Korean bank KaKaobank to tell its customers to stop using the Galaxy S10's fingerprint scanner for logging into its services until the bug is fixed.
Samsung said last week that it's aware of the issue and will roll out a fix "soon." But till now, there is still no fixes.
The company claims that the issue stems from the fingerprint scanner recognizing a pattern on the silicone phone case along with the fingerprint.
It's unclear which phones are affected, but given that the S10, S10+ and the Note 10 all use an in-display, ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, it's quite possible that all these devices suffer from the same issue.
This is not the first issue with Samsung phones' ultrasonic fingerprint scanners. In April, it was discovered that they can be fooled with a 3D-printed fingerprint.
