This article analyzes new attack classes against passwordless authentication, focusing on Google’s synced passkey ecosystem and the Cloud Authenticator used by desktop clients. The attacks demonstrate how malware on a compromised endpoint can misuse onboarding, recovery and device trust workflows to take over passkey-protected accounts. Palo Alto Unit 42 shows how an attacker can authenticate without user interaction, bypass user verification requirements and extract all synced passkey private keys.
After decades of breaches and billions in losses, the attack vectors that defined the era of passwords and shared secrets are finally starting to fade. Passkeys replace passwords and traditional multi-factor authentication (MFA) with public-key cryptography, decreasing entire classes of attacks that have dominated the threat landscape for years.
With no shared secret to steal, reuse or phish, many of an attacker’s most reliable tools are becoming obsolete. This represents a significant disruption for the credential theft market.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- ShinyHunters and ReliaQuest trade blows over claimed breach
August 24, 2026
ShinyHunters has claimed another cybersecurity scalp, but ReliaQuest says the crew’s social engineering attack only got as far as one employee identity before its defenses slammed the door. The ransomware baddies listed US-based infosec biz ReliaQuest on its leak site on August 23, claiming the corporation as its latest victim. The listing, seen by The Register, links to ...
- Experts warn 2,000 hacked WordPress sites were secretly running a global crime ring
August 22, 2026
Check Point Research has unearthed a global cybercrime ring that relied on a network of WordPress websites. The investigation into an operation dubbed “StopAndProtect” found a network of 5,000 infected computers around the globe, and 2,000 WordPress domains. WordPress currently provides content management for around 43% of websites worldwide, making it the most significant CMS available. ...
- Private equity firm Apollo confirms data breach amid hacking wave targeting financial giants
August 21, 2026
Private equity giant Apollo Global Management has confirmed a data breach in which hackers stole reams of personal information from the company’s cloud systems. The breach comes a month after security researchers sounded the alarm on a new hacking campaign targeting financial and private equity giants. The financial giant confirmed the incident in a letter filed with California’s ...
- Securing the overlooked corners of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) supply chain
August 21, 2026
While supply chain threats have been quietly compounding over the past decade, the last 12–18 months have triggered a drastic shift in the scale and velocity of these attacks. Rather than just hunting for bugs in finished software, attackers are targeting the everyday tools and code developers rely on. Unit 42 research shows this happening at ...
- Zombie Card: An expired Visa credit card can be used for purchases
August 21, 2026
Did you know there is still a good reason to physically destroy your expired credit card? Scientific research found that the expiration date used by payment terminals on some contactless cards was not effectively protected against tampering. University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza tested contactless cards across Visa, Mastercard, Discover, ...
- The invisible passenger in your car
August 21, 2026
While monitoring Android threats in June 2026, Kaspersky discovered a new piece of Android malware. What struck the researchers as unusual was that it installed like an ordinary user app yet made no attempt to disguise itself as legitimate software: it had no user interface at all. This led us to suspect the app might ...