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.
Chinese hackers took control of a target organization's authentication stack and maintained persistence for 10 years, with full visibility into the administrative activity. [...]
Splunk has released security updates to address a critical security flaw in Splunk Enterprise that could be exploited to conduct unauthenticated file operations and even remote code execution
A 10-year-old authentication bypass vulnerability discovered in the phpBB forum software allows an attacker to log in as any user, including administrators. [...]
21,786 live cameras stream with zero authentication. Cheap gear is the real risk, webcamXP open 46% of the time. Your home router is the broadcast tower. In May 2026, Mysterium VPN queried a public internet-wide device index to count every camera and recorder that answers the open internet. They found more than three million reachable […]
Attackers are increasingly bypassing weak authentication through phishing, MFA fatigue, and service desk social engineering. Specops Software breaks down five best practices for stronger identity verification and access security. [...]
Critical phpBB authentication bypass lets attackers hijack any account with one request
Attackers can chain three already fixed vulnerabilities in the Ubiquiti UniFi OS server to execute remote code with root privileges and without authentication. [...]