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:
- Dragos Industrial Ransomware Analysis Q3 2024
December 17, 2024
The third quarter (July – September) of 2024 brought transformative shifts to the ransomware landscape, emphasizing its dynamic and continuously evolving nature. The ransomware threat ecosystem remained highly active in the third quarter, fueled by new groups, rebranding of existing entities, expansion of initial access broker operations, and proliferation of illicitly traded tools. Ransomware operators increasingly ...
- Texas medical school says hackers stole sensitive health data of 1.4 million individuals
December 17, 2024
The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) confirmed hackers accessed the personal and sensitive health data of over 1.4 million individuals during a September cyberattack. The cyberattack, which also affected TTUHSC’s El Paso campus, saw attackers steal information including Social Security numbers, financial account information, government-issued ID details, and health information — including medical records ...
- BeyondTrust security advisory addresses a vulnerability in the Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access systems
December 17, 2024
BeyondTrust has released a security advisory that addresses a vulnerability in the Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access systems. Remote Support allows authorised individuals such as IT Helpdesk staff to connect to remote systems. Privileged Remote Access facilitates just-in-time secure access to enterprise environments. CVE-2024-12356 has a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 and if exploited could ...
- Download a banking Trojan to track your parcel
December 17, 2024
In late October 2024, a new scheme for distributing a certain Android banking Trojan called “Mamont” was uncovered. The victim would receive an instant message from an unknown sender asking to identify a person in a photo. The attackers would then send what appeared to be the photo itself but was actually a malware installer. Shortly ...
- Link Trap: GenAI Prompt Injection Attack
December 17, 2024
With the rise of generative AI, new security vulnerabilities are emerging. One such vulnerability is prompt injection, a method that malicious actors can exploit to manipulate AI systems. Typically, the impact of prompt injection attacks is closely tied to the permissions granted to the AI. However, the attack discussed in this article differs from commonly known ...
- Proof-of-Concept Released for Critical Apache Struts Vulnerability
December 17, 2024
Apache has released a security bulletin addressing a critical vulnerability in Apache Struts 2. Apache Struts is an open-source model-view-controller (MVC) framework for creating Java web applications. CVE-2024-53677 is a ‘Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type’ vulnerability and has a CVSSv4 score of 9.5. This vulnerability exists in the File Upload Interceptor, which allows developers ...