Authentication Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a  Windows Hello for Business  key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. SpecterOps showed a Windows and Microsoft Entra ID chain that could impersonate privileged users while satisfying phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA); that chain reused signed authentication material rather than stealing the authenticator's private key. Unit 42 showed attacks against  Google Password Manager in Chrome , including a path that recovers the private keys for a victim's synced p...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security issue with Apple's iCloud Private Relay tool that can expose a user's real IP address. Introduced with iOS 15, iCloud Private Relay employs a dual-hop architecture to ensure users' privacy by routing their Safari web traffic through two relays so that no single third-party, including Apple, can determine where the request is originating from and what sites are being visited. It's available as part of the iCloud+ subscription. Researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, who found the issue, said the problem is rooted in three features in Apple's WebKit: DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport. WebKit is the default web browser engine used by Safari and all third-party browsers on iOS and iPadOS, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Brave, and others. The three features "bypass the configured proxy and send traffic directly from the device, which exposes t...

Connor Riley Moucka pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court on Wednesday to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and a related conspiracy over the 2024 breaches of Snowflake customer accounts . The intrusions reached at least 165 organizations and exposed records belonging to at least 100 million people. Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, personally took at least $495,000 from ransoms and data sales. He is due to be sentenced on October 27 and faces a two-year mandatory minimum on the identity theft count and up to 30 years on the rest. What got the attackers in was old passwords. The credentials had been harvested years earlier by infostealer malware and never rotated, and the accounts had multi-factor authentication (MFA) switched off. No exploit, no flaw in the platform. The Justice Department has never named the company, in Wednesday's announcement or in the October 2024 indictment, identifying the victim only as a U.S. software-as-a-service (SaaS) pr...

Malware running as an ordinary user on a Windows machine can sign into a victim's passkey-protected accounts without a fingerprint, a PIN, or anything at all appearing on the victim's screen. Unit 42 detailed three attack paths against Chrome's Google Password Manager cloud authenticator, which it calls Pass-ta-key , Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key ; the strongest targets the master key protecting the user's synced passkeys. None of this breaks the cryptography. The attacks go after the code around the passkey: how Chrome stores its device keys, how it re-enrolls a device after that state disappears, and whether the site you are signing into bothers to check that a human was verified at all. The attacks can silently obtain a valid authentication assertion, install an attacker-controlled user-verification key, or extract the 32-byte Security Domain Secret (SDS) used to decrypt synced passkey private keys. The researchers said the last two paths can p...

Broadcom has released security updates to address multiple security flaws impacting VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation, and Fusion, three of which have been designated as critical in severity. The first of the three critical-rated flaws is CVE-2026-59309 (CVSS score: 9.8), which has been described as an authentication bypass in VMware vCenter. "A malicious actor with network access to vCenter may exploit this issue to bypass authentication and gain unauthorized access to the system," Broadcom said. The second critical flaw is a directory-traversal vulnerability in vCenter ( CVE-2026-59310 , CVSS score: 9.8) that a malicious actor with network access can exploit to execute arbitrary code. Both vulnerabilities have been addressed in the versions below - VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation versions 9.1.x.x (Fixed in 9.1.0.0300) VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation versions 9.0.x.x (Fixed in 9.0.2.0100) VMware vCenter version...

SAP has rolled out updates to address multiple vulnerabilities as part of its July 2026 security updates, including a critical flaw in SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-44747 (CVSS score: 9.9), an out-of-bounds write flaw that allows an authenticated attacker to leverage logical errors in memory management to cause a memory corruption that could lead to unauthorized data access, modification, or system unavailability. "As a temporary workaround the note proposes to disable all ICF nodes with a specific property in transaction SICF," SAP security firm Onapsis said . "Since the workaround will disable opening transactions in SAP GUI for HTML, it is not an option for all customers and it is strongly recommended to install the patching ABAP Kernel version." Also addressed by SAP are two other critical vulnerabilities - CVE-2026-27690 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An HTTP request/response smuggling flaw in SAP Approuter...

Several versions of firmware released by Chinese network device manufacturer Tenda have been found to embed an undocumented authentication backdoor that enables administrative access to the devices' web management interfaces, the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) warned Monday. "An attacker can exploit this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-11405 , to bypass the password verification process and obtain full administrative control without valid credentials," the CERT/CC said in an alert. The vulnerability impacts multiple versions of the firmware - US_FH1201V1.0BR_V1.2.0.14(408)_EN_TD US_W15EV1.0br_V15.11.0.5(1068_1567_841)_EN_TDE US_AC10V1.0re_V15.03.06.46_multi_TDE01 US_AC5V1.0RTL_V15.03.06.48_multi_TDE01 US_AC6V2.0RTL_V15.03.06.51_multi_T The backdoor functionality is present within the "login()" function of the "/bin/httpd" web server binary. While the method initially follows a normal authentication path using MD5-based p...

BeyondTrust has released updates to address two critical security flaws affecting Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) products that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated attackers to take control of susceptible devices. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-40138 (CVSS score: 9.2) - A pre-authentication vulnerability exists in the authentication subsystem of BeyondTrust Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access stemming from improper validation of authentication data that could allow a network-positioned attacker to bypass access controls and gain unauthorized access to the appliance, including accounts with elevated privileges. CVE-2026-40139 (CVSS score: 9.2) - A pre-authentication vulnerability exists in the authentication subsystem of BeyondTrust Remote Support stemming from improper processing of authentication requests that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass access controls and gain unauthorized ...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting of phishing campaigns that abuse  Cloudflare Workers  to serve phishing sites that are used to harvest users' credentials associated with Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo!, and cPanel Webmail. The attack method, called transparent phishing or adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing, "uses Cloudflare Workers to act as a reverse proxy server for a legitimate login page, intercepting traffic between the victim and the login page to capture credentials, cookies, and tokens," Netskope researcher Jan Michael Alcantara  said  in a report. A majority of phishing campaigns hosted on Cloudflare Workers over the past 30 days have targeted victims in Asia, North America, and Southern Europe, spanning technology, financial services, and banking sectors. The cybersecurity firm said that an increase in traffic to Cloudflare Workers-hosted phishing pages was first registered in Q2 2023, noting it observed a spike in the total number of d...

In today's digital landscape, traditional password-only authentication systems have proven to be vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks. To safeguard critical business resources, organizations are increasingly turning to multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a more robust security measure. MFA requires users to provide multiple authentication factors to verify their identity, providing an additional layer of protection against unauthorized access. However, cybercriminals are relentless in their pursuit of finding ways to  bypass MFA systems . One such method gaining traction is MFA spamming attacks, also known as MFA fatigue, or  MFA bombing . This article delves into MFA spamming attacks, including the best practices to mitigate this growing threat. What is MFA spamming? MFA spamming refers to the malicious act of inundating a target user's email, phone, or other registered devices with numerous MFA prompts or confirmation codes. The objective behind this tactic is to ...

A new research has uncovered multiple vulnerabilities that could be exploited to bypass  Windows Hello authentication  on Dell Inspiron 15, Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and Microsoft Surface Pro X laptops. The flaws were discovered by researchers at hardware and software product security and offensive research firm Blackwing Intelligence, who found the weaknesses in the fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN that are embedded into the devices. A prerequisite for the fingerprint reader exploits is that the users of the targeted laptops have fingerprint authentication already set up. All the three fingerprint sensors are a type of sensor called "match on chip" ( MoC ), which integrates the matching and other biometric management functions directly into the sensor's integrated circuit. "While MoC prevents replaying stored fingerprint data to the host for matching, it does not, in itself, prevent a malicious sensor from spoofing a legitimate sensor's commu...