News archive · 35 stories
October 2026
- PasskeysAmazon says more than 500 million customers have turned on passkeysAmazon updated its passkey announcement on October 20 to say more than 500 million customers have enabled passkeys, which it says sign in about six times faster than passwords. Passwords remain available; Amazon calls a password-free account a goal, not a current default.
- Machine identityBrowsers block eight eMudhra intermediate CAs after their private keys leakA researcher reported on October 17 that the private keys of eight eMudhra (emSign) intermediate CAs, six for TLS and two for code signing, were compromised. Chrome and Firefox blocked them within hours; Apple, Microsoft and Go followed, and Mozilla is removing the emSign ECC root.
- Social engineeringFIDO and Imprivata survey: frontline authentication friction costs 32,400 hours a yearA Sapio Research survey of 700 IT and security leaders for Imprivata and the FIDO Alliance finds 95% have seen frontline workers work around authentication, 33% by sharing credentials, and only 15% use passkeys without a password. 60% report social engineering against the service desk.
- Token theftGhostAction phish completes a GitHub device flow, then hides a stealer in a font fileOpenSourceMalware found a fake GitHub security alert that proxied a maintainer's password and 2FA code, then silently completed an OAuth device flow for repo, workflow and read:org scopes. A second stage planted a credential stealer named fa-solid-400.woff2 in 94 repositories.
- VulnerabilityQilin and INC use the GlobalProtect auth bypass to skip MFA, then dump domain controller disksUnit 42's October 19 update says Qilin and INC ransomware operators are exploiting CVE-2026-0257 in PAN-OS GlobalProtect to open VPN sessions without MFA, then in one case pivoted to vCenter and dumped credentials offline from a domain controller's virtual disk.
- BreachZeabur to shut down after a non-expiring admin token opened its shared clusterZeabur says an attacker used a shared-cluster admin token created in January 2024 with no expiry, plus internal AWS keys, all stored in plaintext in a private config repo, to read 3.2 million environment-variable records. The developer hosting platform will close by December 31, 2026.
- Token theftOne ConnectWise app credential opened Microsoft 365 tenants across MSP customersHuntress found an attacker signing in as the ConnectWise Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) Entra app with a stolen app credential, pulling Microsoft Graph tokens in 162 tenants by October 16 and using a Cloud Management app to grant itself Global Administrator. ConnectWise has disabled seven app identities.
- VulnerabilityPEERSTITCH implant tags FortiOS VPN sessions to skip security checksUnit 42 found an in-memory FortiOS implant that patches the IKE daemon so tagged VPN sessions bypass default security validations. Attackers reached root with CVE-2025-61624, which CISA added to KEV on October 16, and stole VPN credentials from 500+ firewalls.
- Zero-dayBeyondTrust Remote Support zero-day let ARMORY CASTLE dump the credential vaultCVE-2026-102764, a CVSS 9.3 flaw in self-hosted BeyondTrust Remote Support through 26.2.3, was exploited as a zero-day by the China-nexus group ARMORY CASTLE. Mandiant says the attacker pulled every admin credential from the appliance vault and raised Jump Item roles. CISA added it to KEV on October 16.
- PasskeysFIDO Passkey Index 2026: passkeys now carry 36% of sign-ins, and FIDO estimates 7 billion in useThe FIDO Alliance's Passkey Index 2026, built on data from 15 consumer services, finds 36% of successful sign-ins use a passkey, up from 26%, with a 93% success rate against 78% for passwords and traditional MFA. FIDO now estimates 7 billion passkeys are in use worldwide.
- SecretsGhostAction returns: about 1,900 hijacked GitHub accounts pushed secret-stealing workflows to 30,000 reposGitGuardian counts more than 30,000 repositories and about 1,900 compromised GitHub accounts in GhostAction's October wave, which committed workflows that dump Actions secrets and scan git history for credentials. Some victims were hit in 2025 and never rotated.
- Social engineeringIndia mandates registered caller name display (CNAP) on 4G and 5G networks from November 1India's Department of Telecommunications has ordered all access providers to show callers' subscriber-registered names on incoming calls from November 1, 2026, a network-level identity signal aimed at spam and fraud calls.
- Zero-dayIvanti Connect Secure auth bypass exploited; CISA gave agencies three daysCVE-2026-104935 lets an unauthenticated attacker bypass Ivanti Connect Secure's login with a crafted header and run commands. Exploited since early October by an actor that went on to harvest LDAP and Active Directory credentials. KEV deadline October 16.
- VulnerabilityNGINX session ticket bug can skip client certificate checks in mTLS setupsCVE-2026-97629 lets a forged TLS session resume on NGINX 1.23.2 through 1.31.6 when a shared session cache is set without a ticket key file, which can bypass client-certificate verification. Fixed in 1.30.6 and 1.31.7; no exploitation reported.
- BreachPassword "123456" linked to the breach of Denmark's national CPR register covering 8.8 million peopleSomeone abused a private company's lawful search access to Denmark's CPR register and pulled names, addresses and CPR numbers for about 8.8 million people. A person claiming responsibility says the account password was 123456.
- DOJ charges 14 and shuts 40 laptop farms in North Korean IT worker identity schemeThe Justice Department charged 14 people, including aggravated identity theft, and seized about 187 computers and KVM devices after dismantling more than 40 Texas laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US employees at more than 70 companies.
- Supply chainSlugFest: npm trusted publishing trusted repository names, so reclaimed names could publishBloom Security found npm trusted publishing matched GitHub repositories by owner/name until first publish, letting anyone who reclaimed a renamed or deleted slug mint publish tokens for more than 1,500 packages. npm now expires unvalidated configurations after 48 hours.
- VulnerabilitySAP Cloud SDK for Python flaw sends OAuth client secrets to attackersCVE-2026-89111, rated CVSS 10.0, lets whoever controls the tenant subdomain in a multi-tenant SAP BTP app redirect its OAuth2 token request and capture the client ID and secret. Fixed in 0.45.2, but the check went missing again in later releases.
- AI agentsWorkday to acquire C1.ai, formerly ConductorOne, to govern agent accessWorkday signed a definitive agreement to buy C1.ai, the access governance vendor that renamed itself from ConductorOne in April. Price undisclosed, close expected by January 31, 2027. The plan is to tie access for people and AI agents to Workday's HR lifecycle.
- VulnerabilityDocker Hub GhostPat flaw let account conversion hand access tokens to any victimCVE-2026-105445 (CVSS 9.4): for two years, converting a Docker Hub account into an organization re-assigned its personal access tokens to whoever was named owner, without consent. An attacker could mint a token, convert, name a victim, and push to the victim's repositories. Docker found no exploitation.
- Machine identityIonQ to acquire Elisity, an identity-based microsegmentation vendor, for up to $1.3 billionQuantum computing company IonQ agreed to buy Elisity in an all-stock deal worth up to $1.3 billion, including a $150 million earnout. Elisity enforces least-privilege network policy per identity, covering users, devices, workloads and AI agents. Close is expected in Q4 2026.
- BreachASOS breach began with an employee tricked out of their loginASOS says an attacker impersonated a trusted contact to get an employee's login credentials, then used them to reach customer names and contact details on third-party data platforms. Snowflake says nothing on its side was at fault. The number of affected customers is undisclosed.
- AI agentsOne prompt pulled AWS AgentCore role credentials from IMDS, and the default role reached every agent in the regionZenity Labs showed a prompt could make an Amazon Bedrock AgentCore agent fetch its execution role credentials from the instance metadata service. The default role could invoke other agents, read their conversations, plant memories and read Secrets Manager. AWS has since narrowed it.
- Token theftShai-Hulud reaches the Tensorlake npm SDK, with a wiper that fires when you revoke the stolen tokentensorlake@0.5.144, published from the project's own release workflow after commits pushed under a maintainer's name, carried a ChainDrop/Shai-Hulud credential stealer. A token monitor wipes the home directory if the stolen GitHub token is revoked first.
- PhishingUAT-11985 uses fake event invites to hit Taiwan research affiliates with Google AitM phishingCisco Talos tracks UAT-11985, a spear-phishing campaign that lures Taiwan research affiliates with event invitations, then relays their Google passwords and MFA challenges through an adversary-in-the-middle login page.
- FBI and Secret Service: FortiBleed is still active and locking victims outA joint FBI and USSS advisory says the FortiBleed credential campaign is still scanning FortiGate VPNs with stolen logins, and some victims are being locked out when attackers delete or change the original admin accounts. No CVE is involved.
- VulnerabilitySonicWall SMA1000 gets a third CVSS 10 pre-auth SSRF this yearCVE-2026-102255 lets an unauthenticated attacker use an unintended access path in the SMA1000 WorkPlace interface to reach internal functions. CVSS 10.0, fixed in 12.4.3-03670 and 12.5.0-03082, with no workaround.
- AI agentsAn encrypted web page tricked GitHub Copilot CLI into leaking a .env fileAdversa AI showed GitHub Copilot CLI in autopilot mode reading a local .env.prod file and sending its contents to an attacker URL after fetching a page with encrypted instructions. GitHub validated the report but does not consider it a vulnerability.
- PhishingFake ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude ad portals capture credentials and MFA codes with operator-driven phishingIsland found a human-operated phishing platform posing as AI advertising tools. A browser-in-the-browser Connect window steals Google and Okta credentials while a live operator picks which MFA challenge to show next.
- BreachFBI removes contractor after a missed patch led to the ShinyHunters breach of employee dataThe FBI says a contractor failed to apply a patch to a third-party-managed platform, opening the way for the ShinyHunters breach of employee records. Reuters names the platform as Oracle PeopleSoft and the firm as Accenture.
- Digital IDNIST opens an implementation hub for SP 800-63-4, with machine-readable conformance criteriaNIST launched a resource site for the Digital Identity Guidelines, Revision 4, with FAQs, version 0.1 conformance criteria in Excel, PDF and OSCAL, a subscriber-controlled wallet explainer, and an authenticator reference. It adds no new requirements.