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.
Threat actors are exploiting a recently patched security flaw impacting Gravity SMTP, a WordPress plugin that's installed on about 100,000 sites
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Splunk Enterprise flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a Splunk Enterprise flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20253 (CVSS score of 9.8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. The flaw CVE-2026-20253 is an improper authentication vulnerability in the PostgreSQL sidecar service of […]
Salesforce has revealed that it disabled the Klue Battlecards app integration within its platform in response to a security incident impacting the competitive intelligence company on June 11, 2026
AutoJack is a novel exploit chain showing how a single malicious webpage can turn an AI browsing agent into a remote code execution vector on the host machine. By abusing trust in localhost, missing authentication, and unsafe parameter handling, attackers can trigger arbitrary process execution through AutoGen Studio’s MCP WebSocket. The research highlights a broader pattern - when agents can browse untrusted content and access local services, traditional boundaries like localhost are no longer secure. The post AutoJack: How a single page can RCE the host running your AI agent appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
CRM Data Theft Tied to OAuth Tokens Stolen From Third-Party Market Intelligence AppSalesforce disabled connections to its customer relationship management environment from third-party app Klue Battlecards as a response to a "security incident." Attackers breached Klue's platform, generated OAuth tokens for Salesforce and stole data, now being held to ransom.
Market intelligence platform Klue suffered a OAuth breach that enabled the "Icarus" threat actors to steal Salesforce CRM data from multiple organizations in an ongoing extortion campaign. [...]
F5 released emergency updates for critical NGINX flaws (CVE-2026-42530, CVE-2026-42055) that could enable unauthenticated code execution. F5 has issued out-of-band patches for multiple NGINX vulnerabilities, including two critical flaws, respectively tracked as CVE-2026-42530 and CVE-2026-42055 (CVSS 9.2). The bugs affect HTTP modules and can be exploited remotely without authentication to trigger memory corruption, potentially causing […]
A pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) chain in Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools abuses the Integration Broker's PSIGW gateway to execute code inside the application server's Java virtual machine (JVM), evading behavioral and network sensors.
Breaches don't always start with a zero-day. An exposed admin panel can get brute-forced, or credentials reused from a previous attack. But when a vulnerability does drop — like MongoBleed earlier this year, which let attackers pull credentials and session tokens from server memory without authentication — anything internet-facing is immediately at risk
Investigators Found Months of Unchecked Database Scraping ActivitySouth Korea's privacy regulator fined Coupang a record 624.7 billion won after concluding that weak authentication controls, insider access abuse, evidence destruction and unauthorized data collection contributed to the exposure of personal information belonging to 33.7 million people.
Startup Targets Incumbents Doing Directories, Authentication, Federation and SSONewCore, founded by Dome9 creator Zohar Alon, emerged from stealth with $66 million to build security-first identity infrastructure designed to manage the explosion of autonomous AI agents, machine identities and cryptographic credentials expected across modern enterprises.
A vulnerability in the SimpleHelp remote management software allows unauthenticated attackers to create privileged technician accounts on servers using the OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication protocol. [...]
Palo Alto Networks warns that attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-0257, a PAN-OS flaw that lets unauthorized users bypass authentication and establish VPN connections. Palo Alto Networks has confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026-0257, a PAN-OS authentication bypass vulnerability affecting GlobalProtect portals and gateways. Palo Alto Networks addressed the vulnerability on May 13. Two weeks later, cybersecurity firm Rapid7 […]
Palo Alto Networks has revealed that it has observed "active exploitation" of a recently disclosed PAN-OS vulnerability by an unknown threat actor to obtain unauthorized access to GlobalProtect portals