Stay secure online with the latest on authentication techniques, best practices, and industry updates at the forefront of information security.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Authentication confirms the identity of users or systems before granting access to resources, typically using factors like passwords (knowledge), hardware tokens (possession), or biometrics (inherence). It establishes trust boundaries that prevent unauthorized entities from impersonating legitimate users or devices within networks and applications.
Weak authentication enables attackers to perform account takeover, privilege escalation, or lateral movement by exploiting stolen credentials, phishing, or replay attacks. Deploying multi-factor authentication (MFA) with independent factors significantly reduces these risks. Secure credential storage, regular rotation, and monitoring authentication logs for anomalies are critical defenses to detect and block unauthorized access attempts early in the attack chain.
Broadcom has issued security patches to address a high-severity security flaw in VMware Tools for Windows that could lead to an authentication bypass
A set of five critical security shortcomings have been disclosed in the Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution, putting over 6,500 clusters at immediate risk by exposing the component to the public internet