The hacker Starbug has been declared the winner of the unofficial crowdsourced contest to foil Apple's Touch ID fingerprint scanner.
Starbug, whose real name and identity have not been revealed, is a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a Berlin-based collective. He can now claim the bounty of around $10,000 (originally almost $20,000), several bottles of wine and liquor and a pornographic book. Luckily, as the contest organizers noted, Starbug is of legal drinking age.
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The two organizers of the challenge, Nick Depetrillo and Robert David Graham, announced the win on IsTouchIDHackedYet.com, changing the site's header from "maybe" to "yes" on Monday. They also made the announcement on Twitter.
Starbug, of the Chaos Computer Club, is our official winner of around $10,000 in cash, plus bonus prizes http://t.co/4wzIfvf4Ns
— IsTouchIdHackedYet (@IsTouchIdHacked) September 23, 2013
It's official. Starbug of the CCC has been declared the winner of #istouchidhackedyet http://t.co/MniI50BDZ4 Congrats! Video to come soon.
— NickDe (@nickdepetrillo) September 23, 2013
The CCC claimed that they hacked the iPhone 5S fingerprint scanner using a laser-printed fingerprint on Sunday in a video. But the organizers of the contest were waiting for further proof that the hack fulfilled the established rules.
Starbug must still send a video of the complete hacking process, but Depetrillo and Graham had gathered enough independent confirmation to declare the winner, as they explained on the site.
Depetrillo and Graham launched the contest on Wednesday night, before the public launch of the iPhone 5S on Friday. The hack only took a weekend.
Depetrillo, who sparked the contest with a tweet on Wednesday, wasn't too surprised.
"To be honest, I'll say that I'm not surprised that the Chaos Computer Club was the one to do it so quickly ," Depetrillo told Mashable in a phone interview. "The CCC has been around longer than I have been alive and they have extreme major successes and security research that just goes on and on."
“[It] isn't necessarily trivial, it requires some expertise, and advanced procedure," Depetrillo added. "Will your average thief on the streets of New York City be able to replicate this process, before a person is able to lock or erase their phone or declare it stolen? Probably not."
Still, Graham said this won't prevent people from trying to reproduce the hack.
"Just because it's too much trouble for you doesn't mean it's too much trouble for a private investigator hired by your former husband. Or the neighbor's kid. Or an FBI agent," he wrote in a blog post.
Despite the successful hack, this doesn't mean Touch ID is useless, Graham added. He said it's better than no security at all and suggested some ways to prevent Starbug's laser-printed fingerprint hack.
"Use your ring finger or pinky finger instead," he wrote in the blog post. "You don't use these fingers to navigate your phone, so these prints won't be on your phone. These are also the most difficult and unlikely prints to retrieve from other surfaces, like beer glasses."
Those who pledged a reward in the contest are the only ones responsible to pay up. Already, $950 was deposited in an escrow account and around $10,000 more was pledged after Arturas Rosenbacher, a controversial venture capitalist, withdrew his initial pledge of $10,000.
The contest organizers announced that Starbug will donate his winnings to Raumfahrtagentur, a Berlin hacker space and spinoff of the CCC.
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images