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.
Russian hackers bypass multi-factor authentication and access Gmail accounts by leveraging app-specific passwords in advanced social engineering attacks that impersonate U.S. Department of State officials. [...]
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions
Microsoft has announced that it will soon update security defaults for all Microsoft 365 tenants to block access to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office files via legacy authentication protocols. [...]
A large-scale malware campaign specifically targets Minecraft players with malicious mods and cheats that infect Windows devices with infostealers that steal credentials, authentication tokens, and cryptocurrency wallets. [...]
If a credential is worth protecting, it's worth protecting well. Sponsored feature What do flossing and multi-factor authentication (MFA) have in common? Each is highly beneficial, yet far too few people do them consistently. MFA helps protect organizations from credential-based attacks, but according to the Cyber Readiness Institute, only 35% of businesses globally bother with it.…
Plus adds a ton more security capabilities for cloud customers at re:Inforce Amazon Web Services hit a major multi-factor authentication milestone, achieving 100 percent MFA enforcement for root users across all types of AWS accounts.…
Hardcoded passwords and path traversals keeping bug hunters in work Security researchers have issued a warning about a pre-authentication exploit chain affecting a CMS used by some of the biggest companies in the world.…
A chain of Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) vulnerabilities allows attackers to perform remote code execution (RCE) without authentication to breach and hijack servers. [...]