Police said their first big break in the case was provided by the suspect's carelessness.

Hardware security hackers have detailed how it's possible to bypass Windows Hello's fingerprint authentication and login as someone else – if you can steal or be left alone with their vulnerable device.

The research was carried out by Blackwing Intelligence, primarily Jesse D'Aguanno and Timo Teräs, and was commissioned and sponsored by Microsoft's Offensive Research and Security Engineering group. The pair's findings were presented at the IT giant's BlueHat conference last month, and made public this week. You can watch the duo's talk below, or dive into the details in their write-up here.

Researchers have devised a low-cost smartphone attack that cracks the authentication fingerprint used to unlock the screen and perform other sensitive actions on a range of Android devices in as little as 45 minutes.