passwordless | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Almost five months after Google  added support  for passkeys to its Chrome browser, the tech giant has begun rolling out the  passwordless solution  across Google Accounts on all platforms. Passkeys , backed by the FIDO Alliance, are a more secure way to sign in to apps and websites without having to use a traditional password. This, in turn, can be achieved by simply unlocking their computer or mobile device with their biometrics (e.g., fingerprint or facial recognition) or a local PIN. "And, unlike passwords, passkeys are resistant to online attacks like phishing, making them more secure than things like SMS one-time codes," Google  noted . Passkeys, once created, are locally stored on the device, and are not shared with any other party. This also obviates the need for setting up two-factor authentication, as it proves that "you have access to your device and are able to unlock it." Users also have the choice of creating passkeys for every device they use to

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new passwordless mechanism that allows users to access their accounts without a password by using Microsoft Authenticator, Windows Hello, a security key, or a verification code sent via SMS or email. The change is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks. "Except for auto-generated passwords that are nearly impossible to remember, we largely create our own passwords,"  said  Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Security, Compliance, and Identity. "But, given the vulnerability of passwords, requirements for them have gotten increasingly complex in recent years, including multiple symbols, numbers, case sensitivity, and disallowing previous passwords." "Passwords are incredibly inconvenient to create, remember, and manage across all the accounts in our lives," Jakkal added. Over the years, weak passwords have emerged as the entry point for a vast majority of attacks across enterprise and cons

Forget watercooler conspiracies or boardroom battles. There's a new war in the office. As companies nudge their staff to return to communal workspaces, many workers don't actually want to – more than 50 percent of employees would rather quit, according to  research by EY .  While HR teams worry over the hearts and minds of staff, IT security professionals have a different battle plan to draft – how to make the new normal of the hybrid workplace secure. The Trade-off Between Usability and Security A company's biggest vulnerability continues to be its people. In a hybrid workplace, a Zero Trust strategy means ever-tightening security.  The MFA a company chooses  affects the difficulty of logging into email, dashboards, workflow tools, client documentation, and so on. Or, conversely, how porous access security is.  Now imagine this scenario. An employee opens a company portal, confirms a prompt on a company app on her phone, and that's it. She has been authenticated s

Great news. If you have already installed the latest update of Google Play Services released earlier today, and your Android device is running Android version 7.0 Nougat or above—Congratulations! Your device is now FIDO2 Certified. Are you thinking… what the heck that actually means? It means, instead of remembering complex passwords for your online accounts, you can now actually use your Android's built-in fingerprint sensor or FIDO security keys for secure password-less access to log into apps and websites that support the FIDO2 protocols, Google and the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—announced Monday. FIDO2 (Fast Identity Online) protocol offers strong passwordless authentication based on standard public key cryptography using hardware FIDO authenticators like security keys, mobile phones, and other built-in devices. FIDO2 protocol is a combination of W3C's WebAuthn API that allows developers to integrate FIDO aut