Search: “Passwork”

Attackers use passkey-themed scams to hijack Microsoft 365 accounts

Microsoft tracks ongoing M365 cloud intrusions since May using passkey-themed helpdesk vishing, AiTM phishing, and device-code abuse.

Microsoft Security Research has tracked active cloud intrusions since May in which attackers posing as IT helpdesk staff lured employees with fake passkey/MFA enrollment requests. Attacks used adversary-in-the-middle phishing pages, device-code authentication flows, and Teams messages from compromised accounts. Attackers registered their own MFA methods, enumerated tenants via Microsoft Graph, and accessed SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange Online data, throttling activity below 1000 files/emails per hour.

CSO Online·updated Sep 11, 17:26 UTC · 4d ago·first Sep 11, 09:51 UTC · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 9 sources1

Hackers Clone Banking Apps Into Hidden Android Work Profiles to Evade Fraud Detection

GoldFactory-linked Gigabud and Vwork malware clone banking apps into hidden Android work profiles to evade fraud detection across 11+ countries.

Group-IB links Vwork, a modified version of the open-source Shelter app cloner, to the GoldFactory group and its Gigabud Android RAT, which clones victim banking apps into an isolated work profile so fraud sessions look clean to banks. From February through July 2026, researchers observed about 1,469 compromised devices and 1,281 potentially compromised logins in Indonesia, with estimated losses near $960,939. Targets span Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines, Thailand, Türkiye, Laos, and a GCC state; delivery uses fake airline, tax, government, and banking apps pushed via phishing sites, messaging apps, and social media.

Cyber Security News·updated Sep 11, 12:14 UTC · 4d ago·first Sep 9, 13:11 UTC · 6d agoMalware in the wild 6 sources

NIS2 compliance: Fixing IAM and access control before the 2026 audit

EU NIS2 enforcement deadlines approach; organizations are urged to prioritize service account inventory, lifecycle offboarding, and phishing-resistant MFA before audits.

EU member states are moving from NIS2 transposition into enforcement, with fines up to 10 million euros or 2% of global turnover for essential entities and personal liability for management bodies. The article argues access management is the fastest high-ROI starting point, estimating 2-4 weeks to enforce fine-grained password policy, vault shared credentials, and deploy phishing-resistant MFA versus 6-12 months for supply chain risk management. It flags three common pre-audit failures: unmanaged service accounts and API keys, dormant accounts from broken offboarding, and SMS OTP instead of phishing-resistant MFA under NIST SP 800-63B. The piece promotes Passwork as a single control plane for credential storage, RBAC, and WebAuthn.

Help Net Security·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoIndustry

The Router Within: Eliciting Native Skill Routing from a Frozen LLM

Gavel reads native skill-routing signals from a frozen LLM's forward passes with two linear maps, beating retrieve-and-rerank pipelines by up to 21.9 points on Qwen3-32B.

Gavel (Glance And Verdict from a frozen LLM) elicits skill routing from a frozen agent LLM using two trained linear maps that read mid-layer states, keeping all skill text out of context. A glance step scores the full library against compact per-skill banks built in one forward pass at installation; a verdict step resumes shortlisted skills' forward passes and fuses likelihood and yes/no judgments as a product of experts. It transfers zero-shot to three public benchmarks plus SkillTraj, a new benchmark of 372 simulated agent trajectories. On Qwen3-32B it beats progressive disclosure and retrieve-and-rerank pipelines adding 1.2B–16B external parameters by up to 13.4 points on written tasks and 21.9 when skills are needed mid-rollout.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 14, 17:58 UTC · 1d ago·first Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research 2 sources

RightCrowd Pass unifies mobile, physical, and biometric credentials

RightCrowd launched Pass, a credentialing platform unifying mobile, physical, and biometric access credentials, cutting credential revocation from 12.2 minutes to under 60 seconds.

RightCrowd announced Pass, a solution that issues and manages mobile, physical, and biometric access credentials from a single platform instead of fragmented badge programs. Mobile credentials are provisioned through a web-based API and can be suspended or revoked individually or in groups in under 60 seconds, versus an average 12.2 minutes for handling a lost or damaged physical badge. Each mobile credential is tied to a device via two-factor authentication, works with HID, Wavelynx, and LEGIC infrastructure, and counts toward LEED and BREEAM sustainability credits. The product is available now to new and existing customers and can be added to current RightCrowd SmartAccess deployments.

Help Net Security·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoTools

Secure all your internal vibe-coded applications — in one click

Cloudflare launched Access for Workers, letting admins attach one zero-trust policy to a Worker across all routes, domains, and previews automatically.

Cloudflare announced Access for Workers, a feature that binds an Access (zero-trust) policy directly to a Worker rather than to individual routes. The policy then applies automatically everywhere the Worker runs, including custom domains, workers.dev subdomains, routes, and preview URLs. Cloudflare positions it as one-click protection for internal, quickly built (vibe-coded) applications.

Cloudflare Blog·Aug 14, 13:00 UTC · Aug 14, 2026Tools1

Give every teammate and agent the right level of access to your Workers

Cloudflare launches per-Worker granular access controls with four roles, enabling least-privilege access for teammates, AI agents, and CI/CD pipelines.

Cloudflare announced granular authorization for Workers, letting admins scope access to a single Worker instead of the whole account. Four new roles are available: Metadata Read-Only (observability without source code), Content Read-Only (read code without changes), Editor (deploy without delete), and Admin (full control of one Worker). Roles apply at Developer Platform, product, or resource level, can be attached to dashboard users or API tokens, and are available to all customers now, with plans to extend to D1, R2, and KV.

Cloudflare Blog·Sep 15, 13:00 UTC · 21h agoTools

Your passkeys can now move between password managers on Android

Google enabled direct password and passkey transfers between Android password managers, initiated from the destination app without unencrypted file exports.

Android now supports moving passwords and passkeys directly between password managers without exporting them to a file, replacing the previous unencrypted-export workflow. The transfer is initiated in the receiving app, which hands off to Android to detect installed managers and request authorization in the source app. The feature works today with Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with more partners promised but unnamed. Google says data moves between apps in seconds and calls the handoff secure, without detailing the protections.

Help Net Security·Sep 10, 16:00 UTC · 5d agoTools

UK Government Enables Passkey Login for 23 Million Users to Fight Phishing Attacks

UK Government enables optional passkey login for GOV.UK One Login, offering 23 million users phishing-resistant FIDO authentication.

The UK government has rolled out passkey authentication for GOV.UK One Login, the single sign-on for services like tax, State Pension, and driver's license renewals, available to over 23 million users. Passkeys are device-bound, unlocked via fingerprint, Face ID, or device PIN, and the government reports they are up to eight times faster than password plus two-step verification. During the initial trial over 300,000 users adopted passkeys, with nearly one in ten daily sign-ins already using them, saving roughly £600 per day in SMS costs. The NCSC endorses passkeys as phishing-resistant credentials that cannot be intercepted or reused, and biometric data never leaves the user's device.

GBHackers·Sep 15, 05:48 UTC · 1d agoPolicy & legal

MetroLLM-Bench: Evaluating Language Models as Transit Kiosk Runtimes

MetroLLM-Bench is a 955-case benchmark testing language models as transit kiosk tool-calling runtimes across six real metro systems.

The benchmark covers 37-414-station metro systems and eleven task categories including routing, fare calculation, disruptions, accessibility, and adversarial input, with 14 deterministic and 8 semantic scoring components. Of 26 models from six vendors, a PEFT-tuned 4B Qwen 3.5 student scored 91.3 on Tier 1, exceeding GPT-5.6 (90.6/90.0), while Muse Glimmer 30B led the composite ranking. A deterministic rule-based baseline reached 84.6, and PEFT gains over base models shrank from +7.03 points at 2B to -0.91 at 27B.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Product showcase: Enpass Password Manager breaks away from the proprietary cloud model

Help Net Security·Aug 10, 00:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Industry

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers show Grok can be made to exfiltrate user data via Cryptographic Context Injection, a newly documented technique that bypasses LLM safety guardrails.

According to Ars Technica, Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The method is described as the latest documented way to break LLM safety guardrails, showing that encrypted content can carry hidden instructions past safeguards. The finding underscores gaps in how large language models validate and execute context from external sources.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 20, 13:00 UTC · 26d agoAI safety & security1

Researching Employment Scams

Schneier highlights research into North Korean fake-employment IT-worker scams that embed operatives in remote roles for long-term insider access.

The post discusses research into employment scams in which fabricated remote workers, associated with North Korean IT-worker schemes, embed in organizations for months or years to exfiltrate data or position for financial theft. Researchers used controlled sandbox environments to observe operatives syncing personal accounts and working under false identities. Commenters also note reverse scams targeting desperate job seekers through high-pressure MLM and door-to-door sales schemes.

Schneier on Security·Sep 3, 11:18 UTC · 12d agoPhishing & fraud

New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackers·Sep 11, 05:53 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Threat Brief: Mitigating Large-Scale Credential Attacks (Updated August 18)

Unit 42 reports actor TheHatman claims large-scale theft of Microsoft Entra credentials and provides mitigation guidance for credential attacks.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published an updated threat brief on mitigating large-scale credential attacks. In August 2026, the actor TheHatman claimed to have stolen a large volume of credentials from organizations' Microsoft Entra tenants. The brief outlines defensive guidance for organizations facing large-scale credential attacks. The theft claims originate from the actor and the post focuses on mitigation steps.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 18, 19:05 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild

Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 9, 15:58 UTC · 6d agoIndustry

Anthropic Adds Plugin Evals to Claude Code: 6 Grader Types, a No-Plugin Baseline, and a CI Gate for Skills

Anthropic ships a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code with six grader types, a no-plugin baseline arm, and a CI gate via threshold and cost flags.

Anthropic published a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code, exposed via the "claude plugin eval" command on v2.1.269+. Six grader types exist: regex, tool_used, tool_order, and file_exists are free transcript checks, while llm and baseline invoke a billed judge model. Every case runs with and without the plugin, and the delta (Δ) isolates the plugin's contribution; a Δ near zero with a failing tool_used:Skill grader indicates the skill never triggers. CI gating uses --threshold 0.8, --max-cost-usd, --trust-plugin, and --no-publish flags, with results written to a report.html under evals/results/.

MarkTechPost·Sep 11, 21:05 UTC · 4d agoAI tools & infra2

UK Government Begins Moving 23 Million Users Away From Passwords

UK government rolls out passkeys for GOV.UK One Login, giving 23 million users phishing-resistant passwordless access to public services.

The UK government has begun deploying passkeys across GOV.UK One Login for more than 23 million users, replacing passwords and SMS one-time codes with FIDO2 cryptographic credentials. A trial saw over 300,000 people adopt passkeys, and nearly one in ten daily authentications already use them, cutting SMS verification costs by almost £600 per day. Passkeys remain optional, with password-based sign-in retained as a fallback, and the NCSC endorses the approach as phishing-resistant.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 16:52 UTC · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Switching Password Managers in 2026

An Apple password-management engineer (writing personally) explains switching password managers via iOS direct app-to-app export, crediting FIDO Credential Exchange for passkey portability.

Ricky Mondello, an Apple engineer in password management and authentication (writing personally, not for Apple), demonstrates moving 100 items from 1Password to Apple Passwords via the iOS system export, which transfers passwords, passkeys, verification codes, and notes directly between apps with Face ID confirmation and no intermediate files. He credits the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange format (first draft May 2024, now an open spec) and iOS 26/macOS 26 for enabling phishing-resistant credential transfer between apps like 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo, and Devolutions. The post is advice rather than news, recommending bulk transfer on the existing device, switching AutoFill to the new app, and treating the new manager as the source of truth.

Lobsters · security·Sep 8, 13:55 UTC · 7d agoIndustry1

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPost·Sep 13, 05:56 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

Red Flags That Expose Fake North Korean IT Workers

Researchers outline red flags for spotting North Korean operatives posing as remote IT workers as their tactics improve.

Dark Reading describes indicators that help organizations identify North Korean operatives working undercover as IT workers. Researchers say these operatives are improving their tactics, but detection methods still exist. Catching them early helps employers avoid infiltration, data theft, and damage.

Dark Reading·Aug 26, 19:21 UTC · 20d agoPhishing & fraud

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security1

UK.gov begins killing off passwords for 23 million users

UK government rolls out passkeys to 23 million GOV.UK One Login users, saving £600 daily in SMS costs and resisting phishing.

The UK government is expanding passkey sign-in across GOV.UK One Login for more than 23 million users after a trial with over 300,000 people. Nearly one in ten daily One Login sign-ins already use passkeys, which the government says are up to eight times faster than password plus 2FA code. The switch saves taxpayers nearly £600 per day in SMS costs, and the NCSC is encouraging adoption while passwords remain optional.

The Register · Security·Sep 14, 09:16 UTC · 2d agoPolicy & legal

CodeTD: Topology of Attention Detects Hallucinations in Code LLMs

CodeTD detects hallucinations in code LLMs before execution by analyzing topological patterns of attention maps, outperforming recent baselines.

CodeTD applies topological data analysis (TDA) to code LLM attention maps to quantify prompt-generation mismatch as a pre-execution correctness signal. Experiments cover HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and MultiPL-E across 5 programming languages and 10 code LLMs up to 34B parameters. The method outperforms recent baselines and transfers between coding benchmarks, helping catch code that fails the task or embeds security vulnerabilities.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:26 UTC · 8d agoAI research1