Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security feature we have come to expect as standard by 2024. Most of today’s websites offer some form of it, and some of them won’t even let you use their service until you enable 2FA. Individual countries have adopted laws that require certain types of organizations to protect users’ accounts with 2FA.
Unfortunately, its popularity has spurred on the development of many methods to hack or bypass it that keep evolving and adapting to current realities. The particular hack scheme depends on the type of 2FA that it targets. Although there are quite a few 2FA varieties, most implementations rely on one-time passwords (OTPs) that the user can get via a text message, voice call, email message, instant message from the website’s official bot or push notification from a mobile app. These are the kind of codes that most online scammers are after.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Related:
- Experts warn nearly half of the world’s passwords can easily be cracked in just a few minutes
May 8, 2026
Using real-world samples recovered from the dark web, Kaspersky researchers have tested how long it would take to crack most passwords, and found that almost half of the world’s passwords can be cracked in less than a minute. Additionally, the research shows that within an hour, that number rises to three out of five passwords. Armed with this knowledge, ...
- Critical Buffer Overflow in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS User-ID Authentication Portal (CVE-2026-0300)
May 6, 2026
On May 6, 2026, Palo Alto Networks published a security advisory for CVE-2026-0300, a critical unauthenticated buffer overflow vulnerability affecting PAN-OS PA-Series and VM-Series firewall appliances. Prisma Access, Cloud NGFW, and Panorama appliances are not affected by this vulnerability. The vulnerability carries a CVSSv4 score of 9.3 and has been confirmed as exploited in the wild ...
- Thousands of official government email addresses, including plaintext passwords available online
April 11, 2026
The official email accounts of public officials all over the world have been leaked online, with many exposed alongside their plaintext passwords, making it trivial for an attacker to breach their accounts. Researchers at Proton scoured the darker side of the internet for the publicly available email addresses of government officials – and discovered thousands of ...
- Hungary: Nearly 800 state logins surfaced in breach data, including defense and NATO-linked accounts
April 11, 2026
Hungary’s government has discovered the hard way that the biggest threat to national security might just be its own password choices. An investigation by Bellingcat has uncovered close to 800 Hungarian government email and password pairings circulating in breach dumps, cutting across nearly every major ministry, from defense and foreign affairs to finance. This doesn’t look ...
- Google Authenticator: The Hidden Mechanisms of Passwordless Authentication
March 23, 2026
Passwordless authentication is often presented as the end of account takeover. But to understand the real threat landscape, we need to examine how passwordless is actually deployed in the real world. Attackers do not break protocols in theory. They target the most common implementations, the places where usability, scale and architecture intersect. Focusing on one of ...
- Europol, Microsoft, TrendAI and Collaborators Halt Tycoon 2FA Operations
March 4, 2026
Researchers from TrendAI have been tracking the infrastructure, as well as the campaigns and operator behaviors that can be linked to Tycoon 2FA to build a clearer picture of how its services was being used at scale. By November 2025, TrendAI had collected enough data to link the operation to an actor using the monikers “SaaadFridi” ...