All news with #mfa tag

🔒 In December 2025 npm completed a major credential overhaul, revoking long‑lived classic tokens and moving to short‑lived session tokens and OIDC Trusted Publishing to reduce supply‑chain risk. While MFA by default and ephemeral per‑run CI credentials limit exposure, optional 90‑day tokens that bypass MFA and successful MFA phishing still permit rapid malicious publishes. Developers should favor OIDC, avoid long‑lived bypassable tokens, and enforce MFA-on-publish where possible to further harden the ecosystem.

🔒 The Netherlands Police arrested a 21-year-old man from Dordrecht accused of selling access to the JokerOTP phishing-as-a-service platform that captures one-time passwords to enable account takeover. Investigators say this is the third arrest after a three-year probe that dismantled the operation in April 2025 and previously identified a developer and a co-developer. The seller advertised license keys on Telegram, allowing subscribers to automate calls that tricked victims into revealing OTPs, PINs, and card data, leading to fraud and unauthorized transfers.

⚠️ The NCSC has issued an urgent alert to critical national infrastructure (CNI) providers after December's coordinated malware attacks against Poland's energy sector, urging operators to act now to defend UK assets. Director Jonathan Ellison stressed the need to follow recent NCSC guidance on monitoring, situational awareness and hardening network defences. Recommended measures include patching, access controls and MFA, secure-by-design management and robust resilience and recovery plans.

🔍Tax season 2026 brings a renewed surge in IRS-related scams as fraudsters exploit email, text and phone channels to steal refunds and personal data. Scammers impersonate the IRS, tax preparers or software vendors with spoofed logos, domains and caller IDs, and may demand unusual payments or coax victims into filing fraudulent returns. Watch for phishing/smishing/vishing, W-2 fraud, fake tax credits and dishonest preparers. Protect accounts with MFA, consider an IP PIN, file early and report suspicious messages to phishing@irs.gov.

🔒 Microsoft is supporting Operation Winter SHIELD, a nine-week FBI-led effort beginning February 2, 2026, that shifts focus from guidance to practical implementation so organizations can operationalize controls that actually reduce risk. Microsoft will provide technical resources and platform-backed guardrails — including Baseline Security Mode — to enforce phish-resistant MFA, block legacy authentication, and surface unsupported systems. The initiative emphasizes secure-by-default configurations and automation to turn recommendations into enforceable protections and narrow the execution gap attackers exploit.

🔐 AWS announced that AWS Multi-Party Approval now requires approvers to verify voting actions with a one-time password sent to their registered AWS Identity Center email address. The OTP is a six-digit code that must be entered within 10 minutes of receipt, with up to three attempts allowed. Verification occurs when the approver submits their vote, after they have reviewed request details. Administrators cannot bypass this control via credential resets or authentication endpoint changes.

📞 Google-owned Mandiant reported an expansion of ShinyHunters-style extortion activity that combines advanced voice phishing with fake credential-harvesting sites to capture SSO credentials and MFA codes to access cloud SaaS environments. The team is tracking multiple clusters (UNC6661, UNC6671, UNC6240) and observed attackers impersonating IT staff, registering attacker-controlled MFA devices, and exfiltrating data from services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Mandiant recommends strengthening help-desk verification, improving logging and detection, restricting weak authentication methods, and adopting phishing-resistant options like FIDO2 or passkeys.

📰 Hazel Burton opens this Threat Source newsletter by acknowledging how difficult it can be to stay engaged with the news and suggests small, human respites—like the U.K. show Taskmaster—to remind readers creativity and levity persist under pressure. On the technical side, Cisco Talos Incident Response’s Q4 2025 report shows exploitation of public-facing applications remains the leading initial access vector (down from 62% to ~40%), while phishing and credential harvesting rose and ransomware incidents fell to 13% with Qilin still common. The newsletter urges rapid patching, correct MFA configuration and monitoring, and comprehensive logging to detect suspicious activity.

🔐 The FBI has launched Operation Winter SHIELD, a ten-week campaign outlining ten concrete actions organisations should adopt to improve cyber resilience across IT and OT environments. Developed with domestic and international partners and informed by recent investigations, the initiative connects observed adversary behaviour to practical defenses such as phish-resistant authentication, immutable offline backups, vulnerability management and reduced administrator privileges. Aligned with the US National Cyber Strategy and the FBI Cyber Strategy, the effort aims to harden critical infrastructure and reduce the attack surface.

🏥The NHS has issued an open letter (22 January) signaling more proactive engagement with suppliers to bolster cyber resilience across health and social care. The initiative builds on last year’s voluntary cybersecurity supply chain charter and responds to persistent ransomware and supply-chain threats. NHS England stresses this is not an audit but a partnership to identify risks and agree proportionate remediation. Expectations include MFA, patched systems, effective logging and immutable backups with tested recovery plans.

🔔 Okta warns of bespoke vishing phishing kits sold as a service that enable live adversary-in-the-middle attacks to steal Okta SSO credentials. These kits include a C2 panel that lets callers control the victim's authentication flow in real time and synchronize fraudulent MFA dialogs to bypass push-based protections. Okta urges adoption of phishing-resistant MFA such as Okta FastPass, FIDO2 security keys, or passkeys and recommends user education and vendor notifications.

🔒 A critical two-factor authentication bypass (CVE-2026-0723) in GitLab Community and Enterprise editions allows an attacker who knows a user’s credentials to submit forged device responses and bypass MFA. GitLab released patches in versions 18.8.2, 18.7.2 and 18.6.4 and strongly recommends that all self-managed instances upgrade immediately. Additional fixes address several denial-of-service and authorization flaws; GitLab.com and Dedicated tenants are already protected.

🔒 GitLab has patched a high-severity two-factor authentication bypass (CVE-2026-0723) that could allow attackers who know a target's account ID to submit forged device responses and bypass 2FA. The release also addresses two high-severity denial-of-service flaws (CVE-2025-13927, CVE-2025-13928) and two medium-severity DoS issues affecting Wiki rendering and SSH authentication. Administrators should upgrade to 18.8.2, 18.7.2, or 18.6.4 immediately; GitLab.com is already patched.

🔍 Regular cyber risk assessments are essential for identifying vulnerabilities, prioritizing remediation, and documenting security progress for leadership. CISOs receive actionable insights about exposed data, authentication gaps, and compliance obligations (for example, GDPR and PCI DSS). Analyses show one in ten cloud datasets is broadly accessible and more than 99% of compromised accounts lacked MFA. Typical assessments take two to four hours and deliver prioritized, immediately actionable recommendations.

🔒 Modern security must treat identity as the perimeter rather than the network. As remote work and cloud adoption dissolved traditional edges, attackers increasingly target credentials — a trend underscored by reports from Verizon, Microsoft and Okta — making identity the primary attack surface. Organizations must adopt Zero Trust identity controls such as MFA, SSO, RBAC, PAM, device trust and continuous, adaptive monitoring, and treat identity lifecycle and privilege management as core infrastructure.

🔒 LinkedIn's vast professional network provides abundant intelligence that threat actors exploit to support spear-phishing, business email compromise and direct recruitment efforts. Profiles and connections help attackers craft highly credible lures, while messages sent within the platform can bypass corporate email controls. To reduce risk, users should limit public detail, enable MFA, maintain patched devices and complete targeted security awareness training focused on fake profiles and malicious DMs.

🔒 Cybercriminals are increasingly using browser-in-the-browser (BitB) attacks to harvest Facebook credentials, researchers at Trellix report. Attackers distribute phishing emails with spoofed, shortened links and present a fake in-browser pop-up that mimics the Facebook login — even hardcoding the real Facebook URL and displaying a bogus CAPTCHA to boost credibility. Victims are prompted for personal details and then asked to confirm their password; enabling two-factor authentication and avoiding embedded links can mitigate these scams.

🔒 If you learn your personal or financial data is on the dark web, act quickly: cybercriminals use stolen PII, credentials, session cookies and payment details to commit account takeover, identity theft and fraud. Immediately change compromised passwords, enable MFA (prefer authenticator apps or hardware keys), sign out of all devices, scan for infostealer malware and contact your bank to freeze or reissue cards. For longer-term protection, freeze credit, tighten privacy settings, use email aliasing and a password manager, and enroll in monitoring services such as HaveIBeenPwned.

🔐 Meta says it patched a bug that allowed an external party to mass-request Instagram password reset emails and denies any systems breach after claims that data from more than 17 million accounts was posted online. Malwarebytes warned customers of a 17.5M-account dump containing phone numbers, emails, addresses and Instagram IDs, though not every record includes all fields. Meta told reporters it is not aware of an API incident in 2022 or 2024, and Instagram accounts remain secure. Users should ignore unsolicited reset emails, enable two-factor authentication, and stay alert to phishing and smishing attempts.

📧 Microsoft Threat Intelligence warns attackers are increasingly abusing complex email routing and misconfigured DMARC and SPF policies to make phishing messages appear internal. Campaigns exploit MX records that do not point directly to Microsoft 365, allowing messages with the recipient's address in both To and From fields to bypass filters. Lures include password resets and shared-document notices, and some attacks use Phishing-as-a-Service platforms such as Tycoon 2FA to perform Adversary-in-the-Middle attacks that can defeat MFA. Microsoft recommends strict DMARC reject policies, SPF hard-fails, correct connector configuration, and phishing-resistant MFA like FIDO2.