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.
A PoisonSeed phishing campaign is bypassing FIDO2 security key protections by abusing the cross-device sign-in feature in WebAuthn to trick users into approving login authentication requests from fake company portals. [...]
PoisonSeed Threat Actor Uses Cross-Device Login Feature and QR Code to Trick UsersExpel researchers have found a novel adversary-in-the-middle phishing technique used by PoisonSeed, a cybercrime group previously tied to large-scale cryptocurrency thefts, to sidestep one of the most secure forms of multifactor authentication - FIDO2 physical keys.
Researchers discovered a novel phishing attack that serves the victim a QR code as part of supposed multifactor authentication (MFA), in order to get around FIDO-based protections.
Authentication in MCP — the backbone of agentic AI — is optional, and nobody's implementing it. Instead, they're allowing any passing attackers full control of their servers.
AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can’t easily see. These “invisible” non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have
Remote Code Execution Flaw Affects More Than 5,000 ServersThreat actors are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in a server file transfer solution. Researchers say the flaw in Wing FTP Server could allow threat actors to execute system-level commands remotely, using null byte and Lua injection without authentication.