Security News

An identity and access management research report from Enterprise Strategy Group, finds organizations, frustrated with poor user experience and weak security, are moving towards adopting passwordless, continuous authentication. The impact of adopting passwordless authentication 40% of organizations using multi-factor authentication for customers make it optional.

Hackers have begun adapting to wider use of multi-factor authentication. Security researchers at Proofpoint are warning of a new threat that's only likely to become more serious as time goes on: Hackers who publish phishing kits are beginning to add multi-factor authentication bypassing capabilities to their software.

A group of academics at South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have utilized natural silk fibers from domesticated silkworms to build an environmentally friendly digital security system that they say is "Practically unbreachable." "The first natural physical unclonable function [] takes advantage of the diffraction of light through natural microholes in native silk to create a secure and unique digital key for future security solutions," the researchers said.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug in Box's multi-factor authentication mechanism that could be abused to completely sidestep SMS-based login verification. "Using this technique, an attacker could use stolen credentials to compromise an organization's Box account and exfiltrate sensitive data without access to the victim's phone," Varonis researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Zoho has addressed a new critical severity vulnerability that affects the company's Desktop Central and Desktop Central MSP unified endpoint management solutions. ManageEngine Desktop Central is an endpoint management platform that allows admins to deploy patches and software over the network and troubleshoot them remotely.

The FBI is seeing so much activity around malicious Google Voice activity, where victims are associated with fraudulent virtual phone numbers, that it sent out an alert this week. So they tell you they will send you a Google authentication code in the form of a voice call or a text message, and then ask you to repeat the number back to them to prove you're real.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says Americans who share their phone number online are being targeted by Google Voice authentication scams. If successful, they will set up a Google Voice account in their victims' names or hijack their Gmail accounts which will later be used in other fraud schemes or in phishing attacks.

While this new report outlines authentication requirements for government agencies, they are also excellent guidelines for all fields and user levels. On the strength of passwords, NIST underlines that the requirements of using special characters, for example !$#%&, are obsolete since users still tend to add something that will keep the password memorable.

AWS previewed new developer resources at its Re:invent conference, including new SDKs for Rust, Swift, and Kotlin, as well as Amplify Studio for rapid web applications, integrated with the Figma design tool. The SDKs provide a language wrapper for APIs to AWS services.

How can you be sure that someone is who they say they are, if they're not standing in front of you? In a digital world, how can organizations be sure that an individual attempting to access online services is who they claim to be? Or that they exist at all - are they a fake identity created for fraud or malicious intent? Online biometric authentication enables governments, banks and other enterprises to securely verify user identity.