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:
- Russian State-Supported Cyber Actors Conduct Phishing Campaign Targeting Users of Zimbra Collaboration Suite
July 23, 2026
A group of Russian state-supported cyber actors has been targeting and compromising various Western government and commercial organizations using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) software since at least July 2025. The Russian state supported advanced persistent threat (APT) group’s activity is tracked in the cybersecurity community under several names (see Cybersecurity industry tracking), primarily as ...
- Experts warn hackers could shut down entire power grids by hijacking cloud accounts
July 21, 2026
Whenever an AI data center thinks really, really hard, it can increase its power consumption so much to trigger disruptions and possibly even blackouts and gear malfunctions. So, is it possible for a malicious actor to trigger this scenario deliberately, in order to cause physical harm? Multiple researchers from the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wrote ...
- Inside an Exposed WebDAV Malware Delivery Lab
July 20, 2026
An MDR alert recently led our team to an exposed server that was doing more than hosting payloads. It was functioning as a fully operational malware delivery lab. Containing over 1,000 artifacts, the infrastructure served as a QA hub where attackers systematically tested delivery paths, social engineering lures, and WebDAV execution methods. Our analysis reveals an ...
- FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3
July 20, 2026
This Public Service Announcement contains updated information about an ongoing fraud scheme where criminal scammers are impersonating FBI personnel facilitating Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) complaints to deceive and revictimize individuals. This scheme combines several exploitation tactics to include the targeting of previous victims, the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos to create fictitious or misleading promotional ...
- Hugging Face confirms breach affected internal datasets and credentials
July 20, 2026
Hugging Face, a platform that hosts AI models and datasets, said its internal datasets and service credentials were compromised in a hack last week. The company disclosed the breach on Friday, but said it was still investigating whether any customer or partner data was stolen during the incident. In a blog post, the company said a dataset uploaded ...
- Ernst & Young reveals data breach following hack on support system
July 20, 2026
Ernst & Young (EY) has confirmed suffering a cyberattack in which it lost sensitive customer information, including tax data. In a data breach notification letter sent to affected individuals, the firm said that on April 23, 2026, it spotted “anomalous activity” within a third-party platform its IT team uses. This is an IT service management platform ...