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.
Threat Matrix: Mapping threats across cloud web applications
Microsoft released a Cloud Web Applications Threat Matrix, a MITRE ATT&CK-aligned framework mapping threats to cloud-hosted web apps and serverless platforms.
Microsoft introduced the cloud web applications threat matrix, which organizes attack techniques for cloud-hosted web apps and serverless platforms using MITRE ATT&CK tactics, from resource development through impact. The framework covers attack paths spanning application code, managed runtimes, workload identities, and deployment pipelines, cataloging techniques such as subdomain takeover, code injection in connected repositories, compromised registry images, exposed admin interfaces, and serverless trigger injection. It builds on Microsoft's earlier Kubernetes and storage services matrices to help defenders identify visibility gaps, prioritize hardening, and plan investigations in cloud-native environments.
Credentialed Pre-Port Discovery: Don't Probe the Host, Ask it
Rapid7's version 8.58 adds credentialed pre-port discovery, letting scan engines query hosts for listening TCP/UDP ports instead of network probing.
Rapid7 documents credentialed pre-port discovery, available from version 8.58 as an off-by-default per-template option under Asset Discovery. The scan engine authenticates with existing SSH, Scan Assistant, or Windows credentials and receives the host's authoritative list of listening TCP and UDP ports, skipping the network port scan. Hosts without matching credentials silently fall back to network port scanning. Trade-offs include reporting firewall-blocked ports the engine cannot reach, longer scans, and early termination findings caused by repeated connection failures.
SpyCloud 2026 Identity Threat Report Finds Non-Human Identities Are Now the Leading Path into the Enterprise
SpyCloud survey of 750 security leaders finds compromised non-human identities are the top enterprise entry point, yet only 36% monitor them.
The 2026 Identity Threat Report surveyed 750 cybersecurity leaders at organizations with 500+ employees across North America and Europe. Compromised non-human identities (31%) were the most cited primary attacker entry point, nearly double phishing (17%), while only 36% of organizations monitor AI agents, service accounts and API keys. 68% of respondents reported identity-based events, averaging eight each, and 91% use AI tools but only 56% have formal governance over their privileges.
SpyCloud 2026 Identity Threat Report Finds Non-Human Identities Are Now the Leading Path into the Enterprise
SpyCloud's 2026 survey of 750 security leaders finds compromised non-human identities are the top enterprise entry point, yet only 36% monitor them.
SpyCloud's Identity Threat Report, based on a survey of 750 cybersecurity leaders at organizations with 500+ employees, found compromised non-human identities (31%) were nearly twice as likely as phishing (17%) to be the primary attacker entry point. 68% of organizations reported identity-based events averaging eight each, while 95% believe they have visibility into AI and NHI exposures but only 36% actually monitor them. The report also found 91% use AI tools with internal access but only 56% have formal governance, and introduces an Identity Threat Protection Maturity Model.
AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance
Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.
Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.
WordPress Security Plugins: How to Choose the Right One
Sucuri's guide breaks WordPress security plugins into hardening, malware scanning, integrity monitoring, and filtering types, and explains how to evaluate and layer them.
The Sucuri guide explains that WordPress security plugins bundle five capabilities - hardening, malware detection, integrity monitoring, activity logging, and application-level filtering - and that plugins run only after WordPress loads, unlike server-level firewalls. It lists leading causes of compromise: outdated plugins and themes, weak or reused credentials, nulled premium software, insecure configuration, and shared-hosting cross-contamination. It concludes with evaluation criteria and a post-installation security checklist for owners without dedicated security teams.
Optimizing Credential Blast Radius Through Trust Boundaries and Delegation Under Post-Quantum Authentication Costs
Academic paper models credential blast radius optimization across trust domains under post-quantum latency costs, cutting expected impact by up to 36%.
The paper formulates the joint selection of trust domains and credential-derivation structures under policy and latency constraints as an NP-hard optimization problem, showing the scalarized two-domain direct-issuance case reduces to a weighted minimum cut. In 195 of 230 exhaustive synthetic comparisons, joint optimization produced lower credential blast radius than choosing boundaries first, especially under chained delegation. A trace-derived replay using measured post-quantum authentication costs found the best design reduced expected impact by up to 36% relative to a single domain within the latency budget.
Product showcase: mSecure makes one vault do more than remember passwords
Product showcase reviews mSecure password manager's AES-256 zero-knowledge vault with passkeys, 2FA storage, and multi-device sync options.
mSecure is a password manager and data vault for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows using AES-256 encryption and a zero-knowledge architecture, with sync via mSecure Cloud, Wi-Fi, iCloud, or Dropbox, plus local-only storage. It supports passkeys, one-time passwords, a Security Center for weak/reused passwords, and a configurable password generator. Recovery features include two-factor authentication, auto-lock, a Self-Destruct option after failed unlock attempts, and iCloud backups on iOS.
1.1.1.1 now supports post-quantum DNSSEC, all 2,420 bytes of it
Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver now validates post-quantum DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44, a 2,420-byte NIST algorithm, preparing DNS for post-quantum migration by 2029.
Cloudflare enabled 1.1.1.1 to validate DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44 (algorithm 18), a NIST-standardized post-quantum signature with 1,312-byte public keys and 2,420-byte signatures, roughly 38x larger than ECDSA P-256. The large signatures exceed common DNS-over-UDP limits, forcing fallback to TCP and creating downgrade risks while conventional algorithms must be published alongside. Cloudflare cites the risk of a quantum computer breaking RSA/ECDSA signatures by 2030 and plans full post-quantum security by 2029.
AI Customer Service Bots Can Be Tricked Into Stealing Security Codes and Acting as Victims
DEF CON 34 research shows AI customer-service agents can be manipulated via prompt injection and email tricks to leak OTPs and act as victims.
Inti De Ceukelaire, presenting at Bug Bounty Village during DEF CON 34, demonstrated attacks against AI-powered customer service bots with access to customer profiles, billing data, support inboxes, and refund tools. Techniques include transcript-based phishing from trusted support addresses, From-header identity confusion, email normalization abuse to bypass OTP rate limits, and knowledge-base poisoning via RAG crawlers. He recommends separating untrusted content from system prompts, session-bound authentication, consistent email normalization, server-side tool validation, and least-privilege permissions for AI agents.
AI is making fraud harder to spot and identity harder to prove
Experian's 2026 report finds AI-generated scams, deepfakes and synthetic identities spreading across digital channels, pushing businesses toward adaptive identity verification and 'Know Your Agent' checks.
Experian's 2026 US Identity & Fraud Report, based on consumer and business surveys, found 60% of consumers aware of AI-generated image/video scams, 53% of AI phishing, and 47% of deepfake voice impersonation. 80% of US businesses already use machine learning or generative AI in fraud management, while AI chatbot account openings rose from 16% in 2025 to 27%. The report highlights adaptive authentication, behavioral biometrics, and emerging 'Know Your Agent' controls as AI agents begin acting on behalf of customers.
Mapping out your unknown: A threat hunter’s guide to GitHub
Datadog Security Labs publishes a threat-hunting guide with audit-log queries to detect GitHub token theft, device code phishing, and source code exfiltration.
Datadog's threat-hunting guide covers GitHub audit log queries for detecting compromised accounts, stolen personal access tokens, and malicious OAuth app authorizations. Attackers typically obtain credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, leaked secrets, or device code phishing, then map private repositories, exfiltrate source code, and pivot into connected cloud and CI/CD environments. The guide maps detections to MITRE techniques like T1078 and T1528 and documents GitHub logging quirks affecting attribution, token metadata, and visibility fields.
CISA and NIST Release Technical Checklist for Safeguarding Identity Tokens From Theft and Misuse
CISA and NIST published NIST IR 8587, final guidance for protecting identity tokens from forgery, theft, replay, and signing-key compromise.
NIST Interagency Report 8587 (September 15, 2026) expands the IA-13 'Identity Providers and Authorization Servers' control from NIST SP 800-53 R5.1.1, guiding federal agencies and cloud providers on SSO, identity federation, and machine-to-machine authentication. It requires hardware-backed signing-key storage for moderate-impact systems, 90-day key rotation for high-impact systems, token lifetimes under one hour, and sender-constrained mechanisms such as mutual TLS and DPoP. The report cites incidents including forged SAML assertions that exposed over 60,000 emails from a federal agency. It also extends guidance to agentic AI systems using signed tokens and urges post-quantum cryptography migration planning.
GPT-5.6 Luna vs. GPT-6 Astra: Is a $1.20 Model Good Enough for Code Review?
Entelligence benchmarks GPT-5.6 Luna ($1.20/M output) against GPT-6 Astra for code review: Luna found 69 verified bugs at 3.6% of Astra's cost.
Entelligence compared GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20/$1.20 per million tokens) against GPT-6 Astra ($10/$50) on 50 benchmark pull requests from Cal.com, Sentry, Discourse, Keycloak, and Grafana. Astra verified 92 bugs versus Luna's 69, with precision of 96% versus 74%, and Astra caught 19 of 24 security bugs while Luna found only 9. Luna cost $0.20 total versus Astra's $5.66 and reviewed faster at 23 seconds versus 36, with the widest quality gap on Keycloak authentication and permission logic (6 vs 14 verified bugs). Running both models would find 82% of the 143 verified bugs for $5.86 total.
Top 10 Best Endpoint Encryption Software in 2026
A 2026 roundup of ten endpoint encryption products argues the engines are solved and buyers should choose management layers like Intune, Sophos, or Trellix.
The guide ranks ten endpoint encryption options, arguing BitLocker and FileVault have won the engine war so the real purchase decision is the management layer for compliance proof, key escrow, and cross-platform policy. Microsoft BitLocker with Intune is named the baseline for Windows estates, with Sophos, ESET, Trend Micro, Check Point, Trellix, and others covering mixed or regulated fleets. It also warns that TrueCrypt-lineage freeware is unmaintained and that Kaspersky cannot be sold to US customers.
NVIDIA Brings Real-Time AI to Broadcast, Sports and Global Streaming at IBC
NVIDIA expanded its AI for Media suite at IBC 2026, adding NIM microservices for synthetic video detection, body pose, frame generation, upscaling and HDR.
At IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, NVIDIA announced a major expansion of NVIDIA AI for Media, a collection of GPU-accelerated SDKs, NIM microservices and blueprints for broadcast and streaming workflows. The Synthetic Video Detector (SVD) NIM microservice reaches 99.3% accuracy on text-to-video and 97.7% on image-to-video content, while Video Frame Generation boosts frame rates 2x-4x and Video Super Resolution adds 10-bit support; TrueHDR converts SDR to HDR at up to roughly 2,000 nits. Partners including Dalet, TwelveLabs, Wowza, Vizrt and Ross Video are integrating the new services into verification, compliance and live-production workflows.
Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)
Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.
Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.
Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security
Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.
Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.