Stay secure online with the latest on authentication techniques, best practices, and industry updates at the forefront of information security.
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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.
Taiwanese Hardware Manufacturer Fixes Improper Authentication FlawQNAP Systems on Saturday released a patch for a critical bug that allows unauthorized access to devices without authentication. The issue affects its QTS, QuTS hero, and QuTScloud products and potentially exposes network-attached storage devices to unauthorized access.
Salt Security discovered GPT flaws affecting plugin installation, PluginLab and OAuth
Identities are the latest sweet spot for cybercriminals, now heavily targeting SaaS applications that are especially vulnerable in this attack vector. The use of SaaS applications involves a wide range of identities, including human and non-human, such as service accounts, API keys, and OAuth authorizations. Consequently, any identity in a SaaS app can create an opening for cybercriminals to
GitHub users accidentally exposed 12.8 million authentication and sensitive secrets in over 3 million public repositories during 2023, with the vast majority remaining valid after five days. [...]
Technical specifics and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit have been made available for a recently disclosed critical security flaw in Progress Software OpenEdge Authentication Gateway and AdminServer, which could be potentially exploited to bypass authentication protections