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.
Microsoft moves ahead with a plan to sunset basic authentication, and other providers are moving — or have moved — to requiring more secure authentication as well. Is your company ready?
Nothing like an authentication bypass for your private IPSec network Cisco patched three security vulnerabilities in its products this week, and said it will leave unpatched a VPN-hijacking flaw that affects four small business routers.…
Cisco says that a new authentication bypass flaw affecting multiple small business VPN routers will not be patched because the devices have reached end-of-life (EoL). [...]
A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit dubbed EvilProxy is being advertised on the criminal underground as a means for threat actors to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protections employed against online services
A reverse-proxy Phishing-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform called EvilProxy has emerged, promising to steal authentication tokens to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) on Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, GitHub, GoDaddy, and even PyPI. [...]