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:
- Exploring CVE-2024-38227 vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint
October 25, 2024
On September 10, Microsoft released another batch of updates addressing 79 vulnerabilities in its products. Among the patches that caught our attention were those for Microsoft SharePoint, an extensive content management system (CMS). Four out of the five SharePoint vulnerabilities covered by the September release allowed remote code execution (RCE) and one of them posed ...
- Safe Software Deployment: How Software Manufacturers Can Ensure Reliability for Customers
October 24, 2024
Many software manufacturers and service providers deploy software and configuration updates as part of their service offerings. These updates may enhance features and/or address security vulnerabilities to provide benefits and security to customers. However, software and the systems that deploy software are highly complex and continually evolving, making it challenging to deploy secure updates. It is ...
- Command Injection and Local File Inclusion in Grafana: CVE-2024-9264
October 24, 2024
The SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team became aware of a critical vulnerability in Grafana, assessed its impact and developed mitigation measures. Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and visualization solution that can produce charts, graphs and alerts according to the data. Identified as CVE-2024-9264, Grafana versions 11.0.x, 11.1.x and 11.2.x allows an attacker with ‘viewer’ ...
- The Crypto Game of Lazarus APT: Investors vs. Zero-days
October 23, 2024
On May 13, 2024, Kaspersky consumer-grade product Kaspersky Total Security detected a new Manuscrypt infection on the personal computer of a person living in Russia. Since Lazarus rarely attacks individuals, this piqued Kaspersky researchers interest and they decided to take a closer look. The researchers discovered that prior to the detection of Manuscrypt, Kaspersky technologies also ...
- LinkedIn bots and spear phishers target job seekers
October 23, 2024
Microsoft’s social network for professionals, LinkedIn, is an important platform for job recruiters and seekers alike. It’s also a place where criminals go to find new potential victims. Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn is no stranger to bots attracted to special keywords and hashtags. Think “I was laid off”, “I’m #opentowork” and similar phrases that ...
- VMWare vCenter Server CVE-2024-38812 DCERPC Vulnerability
October 23, 2024
CVE-2024-38812 is a critical heap-overflow vulnerability identified in VMware vCenter Server’s implementation of the DCERPC (Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Call) protocol. This flaw allows a malicious actor with network access to the vCenter Server to send specially crafted packets, potentially leading to remote code execution (RCE). The vulnerability, classified under CWE-122 (Heap-based Buffer Overflow), arises when ...