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:
- Basic-Fit confirms data on a million members stolen in cyberattack
April 13, 2026
Basic-Fit, Europe’s largest gym chain, has confirmed data including the bank details of around a million customers was stolen from its systems. Around 200,000 members in the Netherlands alone had their data snatched in a recent cyberattack, the company confirmed on Monday morning via emails sent to those affected. “Today, Basic-Fit has notified the relevant data ...
- Suspect arrested after incendiary device thrown at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home
April 11, 2026
A 20-year-old man has been arrested after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman early Friday morning. The incident happened around 4:00 am when a suspect “threw an incendiary destructive device” at Altman’s home, “causing a fire to one exterior gate” before fleeing on foot, according to statement ...
- 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 ...
- FBI Atlanta, Indonesian Authorities Take Down Global Phishing Network Behind Millions in Fraud Attempts
April 10, 2026
In a first-of-its-kind joint cyber investigation, the FBI Atlanta Field Office and Indonesian law enforcement authorities have dismantled a sophisticated global phishing operation that enabled cybercriminals to steal thousands of victims’ account credentials and attempt more than $20 million in fraud. The operation centered on the W3LL phishing kit, a widely used cybercrime tool that allowed ...
- CPU-Z, HWMonitor watering hole infection – a copy-pasted attack
April 10, 2026
On April 9, 2026, the website cpuidcom, hosting installers for popular system administration software CPU-Z, HWMonitor (HWMonitor Pro) and Perfmonitor 2, was compromised. Kaspersky researchers observed that starting from approximately April 9, 15:00 UTC, until about April 10, 10:00 UTC, the legitimate download URLs for installers of that software have been replaced with URLs to the ...
- ClickFix finds a new way to infect Macs
April 10, 2026
ClickFix campaigns are looking for alternatives now that many Mac users have been made aware of the dangers of pasting certain commands into Terminal. Researchers found that ClickFix has kept the same social engineering playbook but completely sidestepped Terminal by using the applescript:// URL scheme to auto‑open Script Editor with a ready‑to‑run script that pulls Atomic ...