It's a theoretical scientific article so hard to answer your questions
from the newspaper article which was a bit general and for the lay
public.

Again, this is not an article about what happened, it's a computer
science article what is theoretically able to occur. The actual article
may give steps and ways to prevent this.

The points you raise I don't know because I have not read the
scientific article but it would be interesting if the corruption would
go back to the database or the chip itself. If the chip is an EPROM of
some type, one wonders how difficult it would be to corrupt the chip if
it is scanned only in Read-Only Mode. I wonder to corrupt the chip one
would have to corrupt also the scanner and have to do a Write. And in
the past writes take quite a bit of time, but who knows now.

This is maybe along the lines of virii getting into cell phones.
Originally that was thought to be impossible. But people are quite good
at destructive things and can put a virus or some sort of disruption
into almost anything, even document files which were also thought to be
immune before Word Macros.

I remember getting an email from McGraw-Hill which contained an MS Word
document that had a very literary named virus attached! How
appropriate. Fortunately, the virus was relatively harmless and just
messed up the summary documentation of the basic document.