bitwarden

LastPass is warning users about an ongoing phishing campaign that is using fake security notices to direct them to fraudulent websites. The phishing emails are crafted to resemble legitimate corporate communications, notifying recipients of updated security policies and directing them to a landing page that impersonates DocuSign and claiming to provide a document for review. LastPass emphasizes that its systems have not been compromised and that the phishing emails did not originate from its infrastructure, despite the attackers using domains designed to appear as legitimate company services. The emails sent from ‘[email protected]’ notify the user of alleged service policy changes in LastPass, including enhanced SaaS monitoring, master password reset options for administrators, and admin console improvements. Clicking on the ‘Review & Access Terms’ button embedded in the email takes users to a website impersonating the DocuSign service widely used for sending, signing, and managing documents electronically. However, the domain used is lastpasscompliance[.]com, which has been flagged as malicious by Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Cloudflare. Although LastPass could not confirm the goal of the campaign, the company says that the fake site prompts the user to download a file claiming to support both Windows and macOS. The site offers live support through a chat box, but it is unclear if it is functional. At the time of writing, the malicious website has been taken offline. BleepingComputer has found that Bitwarden users are targeted by similar emails sent from '[email protected]' and redirecting them to bitwardencompliance[.]com. In March, LastPass warned about fake unauthorized account access alerts impersonating the password service, targeting users with fabricated communication threads designed to increase urgency and lead to data exposure. Earlier, in January, LastPass users were targeted by fake alerts claiming they needed to back up their vaults within 24 hours, allegedly due to upcoming system maintenance. LastPass has cautioned users that it will never ask users for the master password and asked them to report any suspicious communications to [email protected]. Users who entered credentials on phishing sites are advised to change their master passwords immediately from a trusted device and review their vaults for suspicious activity. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Bitwarden: PoC pubblico per lo sfruttamento di una nuova vulnerabilità Alert AL05/260709/CSIRT-ITA Sintesi Disponibile un Proof of Concept (PoC) per la vulnerabilità identificata tramite la CVE-2026-60104 – già sanata dal vendor – presente in Bitwarden Server, noto software open source di gestione delle password. Tale vulnerabilità, qualora sfruttata, potrebbe consentire ad un utente malintenzionato, appartenente alla stessa organizzazione e in presenza di specifiche condizioni, di eludere dei meccanismi di sicurezza e di accedere ad informazioni riservate sui sistemi target. Tipologia Security Restrictions Bypass Information Leakage Descrizione e potenziali impatti Disponibili Proof of Concept per la CVE-2026-60104 – già sanata dal vendor – presente in Bitwarden Server. Tale vulnerabilità, di tipo “Authorization Bypass” e con score CVSS 3.1 pari a 8.7, è dovuta da meccanismi di controllo non adeguati delle richieste POST /auth-requests/admin-request che consentono l’associazione ad un account vittima di una richiesta Trusted Device Encryption contenente una chiave pubblica arbitraria. Nel dettaglio, un utente malintenzionato remoto, appartenente alla stessa organizzazione e in presenza di specifiche condizioni (tra cui abilitazione SSO con Trusted Device Encryption, conoscenza di un device ID della vittima e necessaria approvazione della richiesta da parte di un Owner/Admin o della vittima stessa), tramite richieste opportunamente predispose, potrebbe sfruttare la vulnerabilità per ottenere la chiave di cifratura del vault dell’account vittima e acquisire un token di accesso valido, con potenziale compromissione dell’intero vault e delle informazioni riservate, ove soddisfatte ulteriori condizioni necessarie al completamento della catena di attacco. Prodotti e versioni affette Bitwarden Server, versioni precedenti alla 2026.6.0 Azioni di mitigazione In linea con le dichiarazioni del vendor, si raccomanda di aggiornare i prodotti vulnerabili seguendo le indicazioni del bollettino di sicurezza riportato nella sezione Riferimenti.

This update succeeds&#;x26;#;xc2;&#;x26;#;xa0;TeamPCP Supply Chain Campaign Update 007, published April 8, 2026, which left the campaign in credential-monetization mode following the Cisco source code theft via Trivy-linked credentials, Google GTIG&#;x26;#;39;s formal designation of the operators as UNC6780 (with their credential stealer named SANDCLOCK), and the lapsed CISA KEV remediation deadline for CVE-2026-33634 with no standalone federal advisory. The Sportradar publication deadline flagged in Update 007 (approximately April 10 to 11) lapsed without a public CipherForce dump, and CipherForce&#;x26;#;39;s leak infrastructure has remained offline. Twelve days after Update 007, the technical compromise picture changed sharply across the W17 window (April 20 through April 26).

Bitwarden CLI: rilevata distribuzione di versione malevola tramite attacco alla Supply Chain Bollettino BL01/260424/CSIRT-ITA Sintesi Proseguono le campagne di compromissione che interessano le supply chain, prendendo di mira in questo contesto il componente Bitwarden CLI. L’obiettivo dell’attacco consiste nella distribuzione di una versione malevola del pacchetto attraverso i canali ufficiali di distribuzione e nella conseguente esfiltrazione di credenziali dai sistemi interessati. L’incidente si inserisce nel contesto delle recenti compromissione delle supply chain inerenti ai progetti Trivy, Checkmarx e LiteLLM, come riportato nel Bollettino BL01/260327/CSIRT-ITA. Tipologia Remote Code Execution Information Disclosure Tampering Descrizione e potenziali impatti Nel dettaglio, il 22 aprile 2026 risulterebbe essere stata pubblicata sul registro npm una versione malevola del pacchetto @bitwarden/cli (2026.4.0) – successivamente deprecata e rimossa – contenente del codice malevolo integrato nel pacchetto di distribuzione. Tale codice risulterebbe essere stato progettato per attivarsi automaticamente in fase di installazione/esecuzione del CLI, consentendo l’esfiltrazione di credenziali e segreti (tra cui token GitHub e npm, chiavi SSH e credenziali cloud) dai sistemi interessati. Le funzionalità malevole risultano particolarmente rilevanti in ambienti di sviluppo e pipeline CI/CD, dove il componente è comunemente utilizzato. Sebbene la versione compromessa sia stata rapidamente messa in quarantena, gli utenti che l’abbiano inavvertitamente installata dovrebbero considerare i propri ambienti come potenzialmente compromessi e procedere con le opportune attività di mitigazione. Prodotti e versioni affette Bitwarden CLI, versione 2026.4.0 Azioni di mitigazione Secondo quanto dichiarato dal vendor, risultano impattati esclusivamente gli utenti che hanno installato Bitwarden CLI versione 2026.4.0 tramite npm durante la finestra temporale di esposizione. Qualora ricadenti in tale casistica, si raccomanda di implementare le misure di mitigazione riportate di seguito e nei bollettini disponibili nella sezione Riferimenti. Disinstallare immediatamente la versione compromessa procedere alla rimozione della versione malevola del pacchetto: npm uninstall -g @bitwarden/cli Pulire la cache di npm eliminare eventuali artefatti residui: npm cache clean --force Disabilitare temporaneamente l’esecuzione degli script npm come misura precauzionale durante le attività di bonifica: npm config set ignore-scripts true Verificare gli indicatori e le procedure di cleanup si raccomanda di valutare la verifica e l’implementazione degli IoC[1] forniti dai ricercatori di sicurezza tramite i bollettini riportati nella sezione Riferimenti. Ruotare tutte le credenziali potenzialmente esposte procedere alla rotazione immediata dei segreti di: token API chiavi SSH credenziali e token utilizzati in ambienti di sviluppo e automazione Verificare attività e configurazioni su GitHub e CI/CD esaminare eventuali accessi non autorizzati o modifiche anomale a: repository GitHub workflow CI/CD credenziali e token associati Installare una versione aggiornata e sicura completate le attività di mitigazione, installare la versione corretta del componente: npm install -g @bitwarden/[email protected] [1] Per definizione, non tutti gli indicatori di compromissione sono malevoli. Questo CSIRT non ha alcuna responsabilità per l'attuazione di eventuali azioni proattive (es. inserimento degli IoC in blocklist) relative agli indicatori forniti. Le informazioni contenute in questo documento rappresentano la migliore comprensione della minaccia al momento del rilascio.

The Bitwarden command-line interface (CLI) NPM package was compromised in a supply chain attack that appears tied to previous campaigns against the open source software (OSS) ecosystem. One of the most popular open source password management platforms, with over 250,000 monthly downloads, Bitwarden allows enterprises to secure authentication with zero-knowledge encryption, password sharing, and policy and credential management. On Thursday, multiple security firms warned that version 2026.4.0 of the Bitwarden CLI’s NPM package contained malicious code to fetch a JavaScript payload designed to steal credentials and secrets from victim machines. The malicious package contained an altered execution path to run a malicious loader, download a Bun archive from GitHub, extract it, and execute the JavaScript payload. The malware contains three collectors targeting secrets and tokens across Azure, AWS, GitHub, GCP, and NPM, as well as SSH material, shell history, and AI tooling configuration and MCP-related files, JFrog explains. Additionally, the payload weaponizes the identified GitHub tokens and abuses GitHub Actions to create repositories in the victims’ accounts, create branches, commit workflow files, and download the resulting artifacts to extract more secret material. The malware attempts to exfiltrate the collected data via HTTPS but switches to GitHub paths if that fails. “The most notable aspect of this package is that it combines a supply chain compromise of a legitimate CLI identity with a broad post-install secret theft framework. Instead of stopping at .npmrc or a single PAT, the malware systematically pivots across local credentials, CI secrets, GitHub repositories, and multiple cloud secret stores,” JFrog notes. Bitwarden confirmed the supply chain hack, but noted that its investigation “found no evidence that end user vault data was accessed or at risk, or that production data or production systems were compromised”. The Checkmarx attack The Bitwarden CLI compromise is linked to the recent supply chain attack on Checkmarx, which hit the company’s public DockerHub KICS image, public ast-github-action, VS Code extension, and Developer Assist extension. On April 22, Checkmarx confirmed the incident, sharing details on the malicious artifacts associated with the attack and urging users to immediately rotate secrets and credentials if they were affected. The malware used in the attack was designed to harvest credentials and exfiltrate them to the checkmarx[.]cx domain, or to repositories created under the victim’s GitHub account, a pattern used in the Bitwarden supply chain attack as well. Socket’s analysis of the two incidents also revealed the use of the same embedded payload structure, credential harvesting method, propagation technique, and Russian locale kill switch. “The shared tooling strongly suggests a connection to the same malware ecosystem, but the operational signatures differ in ways that complicate attribution,” Socket notes. The TeamPCP and Shai-Hulud connections The complication, the cybersecurity firm explains, comes from the fact that the Checkmarx attack was claimed by TeamPCP, while the Bitwarden incident references the Shai-Hulud worm that crawled through NPM last year. Also known as DeadCatx3, PCPcat, and ShellForce, TeamPCP is a hacking group active since at least 2024 that has been focusing on supply chain attacks for the past year. The hacking group made headlines over the past month after it compromised Aqua Security’s Trivy vulnerability scanner to steal secrets and pivot across the OSS ecosystem and beyond. As Socket notes, TeamPCP apparently claimed responsibility for the Checkmarx incident on social media, which did not come as a surprise, as it had hit the company’s GitHub Actions and OpenVSX plugins as part of the March campaign. However, the Bitwarden payload contains the “Shai-Hulud: The Third Coming” string, suggesting that the incident represents the latest phase of the previous campaign, OX Security says. Terms such as atreides, fremen, sandworm, and sardaukar were also found in the code, which points to a possible overlap with the Shai-Hulud campaigns, but it does not definitely link TeamPCP to the previous attacks, JFrog notes. Shai-Hulud first emerged in the NPM registry in September, when it spread to more than 180 packages using stolen developer credentials. During a second wave in November, it infected over 640 packages. “User data is being publicly exfiltrated to GitHub, often going undetected because security tools typically don’t flag data being sent there. This makes the risk significantly more dangerous: anyone searching GitHub can potentially find and access those credentials. At that point, sensitive data is no longer in the hands of a single threat actor; it’s exposed to anyone,” said OX Security team lead Moshe Ben Siman Tov. Related: ‘By Design’ Flaw in MCP Could Enable Widespread AI Supply Chain Attacks Related: OpenAI Impacted by North Korea-Linked Axios Supply Chain Hack Related: European Commission Confirms Data Breach Linked to Trivy Supply Chain Attack

Updated with further information from Bitwarden. The Bitwarden CLI was briefly compromised after attackers uploaded a malicious @bitwarden/cli package to npm containing a credential-stealing payload capable of spreading to other projects. According to reports by Socket, JFrog, and OX Security, the malicious package was distributed as version 2026.4.0 and remained available between 5:57 PM and 7:30 PM ET on April 22, 2026, before being removed. Bitwarden confirmed the incident, stating that the breach affected only its npm distribution channel for the CLI npm package and only those who downloaded the malicious version. "The investigation found no evidence that end user vault data was accessed or at risk, or that production data or production systems were compromised. Once the issue was detected, compromised access was revoked, the malicious npm release was deprecated, and remediation steps were initiated immediately," Bitwarden shared in a statement. "The issue affected the npm distribution mechanism for the CLI during that limited window, not the integrity of the legitimate Bitwarden CLI codebase or stored vault data." Bitwarden says it revoked the compromised access and deprecated the affected CLI npm release. The Bitwarden supply chain attack According to Socket, threat actors appear to have used a compromised GitHub Action in Bitwarden's CI/CD pipeline to inject malicious code into the CLI npm package. According to JFrog, the package was modified so that the preinstall script and the CLI entry point use a custom loader named bw_setup.js, which checks for the Bun runtime and, if it does not exist, downloads it. The loader then uses the Bun runtime to launch an obfuscated JavaScript file named bw1.js, which acts as credential-stealing malware. Once executed, the malware collects a wide range of secrets from infected systems, including npm tokens, GitHub authentication tokens, SSH keys, and cloud credentials for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The malware encrypts the collected data using AES-256-GCM and exfiltrates it by creating public GitHub repositories under the victim's account, where the encrypted data is stored. OX Security says that these created repositories contain the string "Shai-Hulud: The Third Coming," a reference to previous npm supply chain attacks that used a similar method and text string when exfiltrating stolen data. The malware also features self-propagation capabilities, with OX Security reporting that it can use stolen npm credentials to identify packages the victim can modify and inject them with malicious code. Socket also observed that the payload targets CI/CD environments and attempts to harvest secrets that can be reused to expand the attack. The attack comes after Checkmarx disclosed a separate supply chain incident yesterday that impacts its KICS Docker images, GitHub Actions, and developer extensions. While it is not known exactly how attackers gained access, Bitwarden told BleepingComputer the incident was linked to the Checkmarx supply chain attack, with a compromised Checkmarx-related development tool enabling abuse of the npm delivery path for the CLI during a limited time window. Socket told BleepingComputer that there are overlapping indicators between the Checkmarx breach and this attack. "The connection is at the malware and infrastructure level. In the Bitwarden case, the malicious payload uses the same audit.checkmarx[.]cx/v1/telemetry endpoint that appeared in the Checkmarx incident. It also uses the same __decodeScrambled obfuscation routine with the seed 0x3039, and shows the same general pattern of credential theft, GitHub-based exfiltration, and supply chain propagation behavior," Socket told BleepingComputer. "That overlap goes beyond a superficial resemblance. The Bitwarden payload contains the same kind of embedded gzip+base64 components we saw in the earlier malware, including tooling for credential collection and downstream abuse." Both campaigns have been linked to a threat actor known as TeamPCP, who previously targeted developer packages in the massive Trivy and LiteLLM supply chain attacks. Developers who installed the affected version should treat their systems and credentials as compromised and rotate all exposed credentials, especially those used for CI/CD pipelines, cloud storage, and developer environments. Update 4/23/26: Updated the story with information from Bitwarden confirming the incident was linked to the Checkmarx supply chain attack. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Bitwarden CLI, the command-line interface for the password manager Bitwarden, has reportedly been compromised as part of a newly discovered and ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign, according to findings from JFrog and Socket. "The affected package version appears to be @bitwarden/[email protected], and the malicious code was published in 'bw1.js,' a file included in the package contents," the application security company said. "The attack appears to have leveraged a compromised GitHub Action in Bitwarden's CI/CD pipeline, consistent with the pattern seen across other affected repositories in this campaign." In a post on X, JFrog said the rogue version of the package "steals GitHub/npm tokens, .ssh, .env, shell history, GitHub Actions and cloud secrets, then exfiltrates the data to private domains and as GitHub commits." Specifically, the malicious code is executed by means of a preinstall hook, resulting in the theft of local, CI, GitHub, and cloud secrets. The data is exfiltrated to the domain "audit.checkmarx[.]cx" and to a GitHub repository as a fallback if the primary method fails. The entire series of actions is listed below - It launches a credential stealer that targets developer secrets, GitHub Actions environments, and artificial intelligence (AI) coding tool configurations, including Claude, Kiro, Cursor, Codex CLI, and Aider. The stolen data is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and exfiltrated to audit.checkmarx[.]cx, a domain impersonating Checkmarx. If GitHub tokens are found, the malware weaponizes them to inject malicious Actions workflows into repositories and extract CI/CD secrets. "A single developer with @bitwarden/[email protected] installed can become the entry point for a broader supply chain compromise, with the attacker gaining persistent workflow injection access to every CI/CD pipeline the developer’s token can reach," StepSecurity said. While the malicious version is no longer available for download from npm, Socket said the compromise follows the same GitHub Actions supply chain vector identified in the Checkmarx campaign. As part of the effort, threat actors have been found abusing stolen GitHub tokens to inject a new GitHub Actions workflow that captures secrets available to the workflow run, and uses harvested npm credentials to push malicious versions of the package to read the malware to downstream users. According to security researcher Adnan Khan, the threat actor is said to have used a malicious workflow to publish the malicious bitwarden CLI. "I believe this is the first time a package using NPM trusted publishing has been compromised," Khan added. It's suspected that the threat actor known as TeamPCP is behind the latest attack aimed at Checkmarx. As of writing, TeamPCP's X account has been suspended for violating the platform's rules. OX Security, in a breakdown of the attack, said it identified the string "Shai-Hulud: The Third Coming" in the package, suggesting this could likely be the next phase of the supply chain attack campaign that came to light last year. "The latest Shai Hulud incident is just the latest in a long chain of threats targeting developers around the world. User data is being publicly exfiltrated to GitHub, often going undetected because security tools typically don't flag data being sent there," Moshe Siman Tov Bustan, Security Research Team Lead at OX Security, said. "This makes the risk significantly more dangerous: anyone searching GitHub can potentially find and access those credentials. At that point, sensitive data is no longer in the hands of a single threat actor – it’s exposed to anyone." Like in the case of the Checkmarx incident, the stolen data is exfiltrated to public repositories created under victim accounts using a Dune-themed naming scheme in the same format " - - . "But in an interesting shift, the malware is also designed to quit execution on systems if their locale corresponds to Russia. "The shared tooling strongly suggests a connection to the same malware ecosystem, but the operational signatures differ in ways that complicate attribution," Socket said. "This suggests either a different operator using shared infrastructure, a splinter group with stronger ideological motivations, or an evolution in the campaign's public posture." When reached for comment, Bitwarden confirmed the incident and said it stemmed from the compromise of its npm distribution mechanism following the Checkmarx supply chain attack, but emphasized that no end-user data was accessed as part of the attack. The entire statement shared with The Hacker News is reproduced verbatim below - The Bitwarden security team identified and contained a malicious package that was briefly distributed through the npm delivery path for @bitwarden/[email protected] between 5:57 PM and 7:30 PM (ET) on April 22, 2026, in connection with a broader Checkmarx supply chain incident. The investigation found no evidence that end user vault data was accessed or at risk, or that production data or production systems were compromised. Once the issue was detected, compromised access was revoked, the malicious npm release was deprecated, and remediation steps were initiated immediately. The issue affected the npm distribution mechanism for the CLI during that limited window, not the integrity of the legitimate Bitwarden CLI codebase or stored vault data. Users who did not download the package from npm during that window were not affected. Bitwarden has completed a review of internal environments, release paths, and related systems, and no additional impacted products or environments have been identified at this time. A CVE for Bitwarden CLI version 2026.4.0 is being issued in connection with this incident. Per a breakdown of the attack published by Endor Labs, Bitwarden's GitHub repository uses "checkmarx/ast-github-action," which was one of the artifacts that was compromised in the Checkmarx supply chain incident. The application security vendor described the malicious Bitwarden CLI as one of the "more capable npm supply chain payloads" published to date. "It combines a multi-cloud credential harvester targeting six distinct secret surfaces, a self-propagating npm worm that re-infects all packages a victim token can publish, a GitHub commit dead-drop C2 channel with RSA-signed command delivery, authenticated-encryption exfiltration that survives repository seizure, shell RC persistence, and a novel module that specifically targets authenticated AI coding assistants," Endor Labs researcher Kiran Raj said. Additional analyses of the attack are listed below - "Every payload, from the CanisterSprawl worm to the trojanized KICS scanner to the xinference stealer, was engineered to do one thing: extract credentials from the environments where developers and pipelines operate," GitGuardian said. "The question every affected team should be asking right now isn't just 'did this package run in my environment?' It's: what secrets were accessible if it did, and have they been rotated?" Update For users who installed the trojanized package during the affected window, Bitwarden has released @bitwarden/cli version 2026.4.1, which is a re-release of 2026.3.0. It's estimated that a total of 334 downloads of version 2026.4.0 took place. In addition, the company is urging affected users to perform the following steps prior to installing the safe version - Uninstall Bitwarden CLI 2026.4.0 via npm. Clear the npm cache. Temporarily disable npm install scripts during cleanup as a precaution. Review for indicators of compromise. Rotate any secrets that may have been exposed on the affected system or stored in environment variables. Review GitHub activity, CI workflows, and related credentials for unauthorized access or changes. Install Bitwarden CLI 2026.4.1 via npm. The company said it's "in the process of completing a full review and will implement mitigation to prevent such attacks in the future." (The story was updated after publication to include additional insights.)

A new info-stealing malware called Torg Grabber is stealing sensitive data from 850 browser extensions, more than 700 of them for cryptocurrency wallets. Initial access is obtained through the ClickFix technique by hijacking the clipboard and tricking the user into executing a malicious PowerShell command. According to researchers at cybersecurity company Gen Digital, Torg Grabber is actively developed, with 334 unique samples compiled in three months (between December 2025 and February 2026) and new command-and-control (C2) servers registered every week. Apart from cryptocurrency wallets, Torg Grabber steals data from 103 password managers and two-factor authentication tools, and 19 note-taking apps. Rapid evolution In a technical report this week, Gen Digital researchers say that Torg Grabber's initial builds used a Telegram-based and then a custom, encrypted TCP protocol for data exfiltration. On December 18, 2025, the two mechanisms were abandoned in favor of an HTTPS connection routed through Cloudflare infrastructure. The method supports chunked data uploads and payload delivery. The malware features several anti-analysis mechanisms, multi-layered obfuscation, and uses direct syscalls and reflective loading for evasion, running the final payload entirely in memory. On December 22, 2025, Torg Grabber added App-Bound Encryption (ABE) bypass to beat Chrome’s (and Brave's, Edge's, Vivaldi's, and Opera's) cookie protection system, like many other information stealers. However, the researchers also discovered a standalone tool called Underground, used for extracting browser data. It injects a DLL reflectively into the browser to access Chrome’s COM Elevation Service and extract the master encryption key, a method also recently seen in VoidStealer. Extensive data theft capabilities Gen Digital found that Torg Grabber targets 25 Chromium-based browsers and 8 Firefox variants, trying to steal credentials, cookies, and autofill data. Of the 850 browser extensions it targets, 728 are for cryptocurrency wallets, covering "essentially every crypto wallet ever conceived by human optimism." "The marquee names are all there - MetaMask, Phantom, TrustWallet, Coinbase, Binance, Exodus, TronLink, Ronin, OKX, Keplr, Rabby, Sui, Solflare," the researchers say. "But the list doesn’t stop at the big names. It keeps going, deep into the long tail, past projects with install counts you could fit in a phone booth." Apart from wallets, the malware also targets a large list of 103 extensions for passwords, tokens, and authenticators: LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass, NordPass, Dashlane, ProtonPass, Enpass, Psono, Pleasant Password Server, heylogin, 2FAAuth, GAuth, TOTP Authenticator, and Akamai MFA. Torg Grabber also targets information from Discord, Telegram, Steam, VPN apps, FTP apps, email clients, password managers, and desktop cryptocurrency wallet apps. The malware can also profile the host, create a hardware fingerprint, document installed software (including 24 antivirus tools), take screenshots of the user’s desktop, and steal files from the Desktop/Documents folders. Also notable is its capability to execute shellcode on the compromised device, delivered in ChaCha-encrypted zlib-compressed form from the C2. Gen Digital cautions that Torg Grabber continues to develop rapidly, registering new C2 domains weekly, and that its operator base is expanding, with 40 tags documented by the time of analysis. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Bitwarden announced support for logging into Windows 11 devices using passkeys stored in the manager's vault, enabling phishing-resistant authentication. The new feature is available for all plans, including the free tier, and allows logging into Windows by selecting the security key option and scanning a QR code with a mobile device to confirm access to the passkey stored in the Bitwarden encrypted vault. Bitwarden is an open-source password and secrets manager that can store account passwords, passkeys, API keys, credit card details, identity data, and private notes. To use the new feature, there are three required conditions: Have Entra ID–joined devices FIDO2 security key sign-in is enabled Have a registered Entra ID passkey stored in their Bitwarden vault “Windows now supports industry-standard passkeys secured in the Bitwarden vault, enabling passwordless authentication during sign-in,” Bitwarden says in a press release. “Users can choose to log in with a passkey stored in the Bitwarden vault, allowing Windows to authenticate using cryptographic credentials rather than passwords, without transmitting shared secrets.” Bitwarden acts as the passkey provider in the Windows authentication flow, storing the credential in the user’s synced vault rather than binding it to a single device. This also allows recovery using other devices in case of losing the phone. More importantly, by removing password entry from the login process and using cryptographic challenges signed with private keys stored in the vault, the risk of credential exposure to phishing drops dramatically. Bitwarden states that Microsoft will roll out passkey login on Windows this month, and it depends on the Microsoft Entra ID configuration. In November 2025, Microsoft announced the introduction of a passkey provider API on Windows 11, allowing third-party apps like Bitwarden and 1Password to store and manage passkeys for websites and apps on the OS. The latest announcement extends this further, to a more fundamental authentication layer, that of the OS itself. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Se c’è una promessa che il marketing dei password manager ha trasformato in un mantra, è quella della zero-knowledge encryption: “i vostri dati sono cifrati end-to-end, nemmeno noi sappiamo cosa custodite nel vault”. Una garanzia che ha convinto milioni di utenti e migliaia di aziende ad affidare a questi servizi cloud le credenziali più critiche, tra cui accessi a sistemi bancari, piattaforme aziendali e infrastrutture IT. Lo scorso 16 febbraio 2026, l’Applied Cryptography Group del Politecnico federale di Zurigo (ETH Zurich)[1] ha pubblicato una ricerca che sta scuotendo il settore. Il paper “Zero Knowledge (About) Encryption: A Comparative Security Analysis of Three Cloud-based Password Managers”[2] verrà presentato alla conferenza USENIX Security 2026 e rappresenta il primo studio sistematico sull’architettura crittografica dei principali password manager cloud-based[3]. Il titolo gioca volutamente con le parole: zero knowledge non indica solo la promessa commerciale, ma la reale conoscenza (o meglio: la mancanza di essa) che i fornitori dimostrano circa la sicurezza dei loro stessi sistemi. “Il punto non è se i password manager sono inutili, ma che il marketing della zero-knowledge li ha venduti come cassaforte inviolabile e l’ETH Zurich gli ha appena tolto il lucchetto davanti a tutti”, sottolinea Sandro Sana, Ethical Hacker e membro del Comitato Scientifico Cyber 4.0. Giorgio Sbaraglia, consulente aziendale cyber security e membro del Comitato Direttivo Clusit, aggiunge anche altre importanti considerazioni: “La scoperta delle vulnerabilità nel modello zero-knowledge che è alla base del funzionamento dei password manager è certamente preoccupante, ma vanno fatte alcune considerazioni”. “Non esiste un sistema sicuro al 100%, cioè qualunque sistema è vulnerabile”, continua Giorgio Sbaraglia, “ma è importante valutare almeno questi aspetti: Quanto è effettivamente sfruttabile la vulnerabilità? E quali sono le alternative? In altre parole: non tutti i password manager sono sicuri allo stesso livello, ma rimangono comunque – oggi – il miglior compromesso tra sicurezza e praticità. Almeno fino a quando continueremo ad utilizzare le password come sistema di autenticazione”. Indice degli argomenti Per comprendere la portata della ricerca è necessario capire il modello di attacco adottato dai ricercatori. In particolare, il team di ricerca ha simulato uno scenario in cui un server del password manager risulta compromesso e stiamo parlando di una condizione non solo teorica, considerato che LastPass ha subito una violazione significativa dei propri sistemi nel 2022 che ha portato alla compromissione di dati cifrati degli utenti. Il presupposto è il cosiddetto malicious server threat model: in pratica, il server è in mano a un attaccante che può deviare arbitrariamente dal comportamento atteso e interagire in modo malevolo con i client degli utenti (browser extension, app mobile, client desktop). I ricercatori hanno quindi configurato server propri che si comportavano come versioni compromesse dei password manager originali. La cosa sorprendente e preoccupante è che non sono stati necessari exploit sofisticati: gli attacchi sfruttano interazioni di routine come il semplice login all’account, l’apertura del vault, la visualizzazione di una password o la sincronizzazione dei dati tra dispositivi, azioni che ogni utente compie più volte al giorno. “Se il threat model ‘server compromesso’ produce 25 attacchi concreti su Bitwarden, LastPass e Dashlane, allora la promessa “anche noi non possiamo leggere nulla” non basta più come garanzia: serve integrità oltre alla cifratura”, è il punto su cui richiama l’attenzione Sandro Sana. Invece, riprendendo le sue considerazioni iniziali, Giorgio Sbaraglia aggiunge che: “La domanda “quanto è effettivamente sfruttabile la vulnerabilità?” rappresenta un discrimine sostanziale per comprendere la gravità del problema”. “Il team di ricercatori di ETH Zurich ha simulato uno scenario in cui un server del password manager risulta compromesso: questa è una condizione possibile (e già accaduta con LastPass), ma comunque non semplice da ottenere da parte dell’attaccante”, fa notare giustamente Sbaraglia, aggiungendo che: “La compromissione del server è il requisito per lo sfruttamento delle vulnerabilità scoperte: non si tratta quindi di exploit eseguibili da remoto, quindi non così semplici da realizzare”. Integrity violations: modifica silenziosa di specifiche voci nel vault di un utente target Full vault compromise: accesso completo a tutte le credenziali di un’organizzazione Credential substitution: sostituzione di URL associati a una password (phishing facilitato) Key recovery attacks: recupero della chiave master in particolari condizioni di sincronizzazione Share/recovery feature abuse: sfruttamento delle funzioni di condivisione e recupero account “Siamo rimasti sorpresi dalla gravità delle vulnerabilità”, ha dichiarato il professor Kenneth Paterson, titolare della cattedra di Computer Science all’ETH Zurich. Una sorpresa che ha una spiegazione precisa: i password manager sono tra i pochi servizi cloud che promettono cifratura end-to-end e ci si aspettava che proprio per questa ragione il loro codice fosse sottoposto a un livello di scrutinio crittografico superiore alla media. Ma, evidentemente, così non è stato. La causa principale identificata dai ricercatori è una tensione strutturale tra usabilità e sicurezza. Le aziende sviluppatrici investono molto nell’aggiungere funzionalità che rendono il servizio più comodo: recupero dell’account in caso di perdita della master password, condivisione del vault con familiari o colleghi, sincronizzazione multi-dispositivo, piani Enterprise con gestione centralizzata degli accessi. Ciascuna di queste funzionalità introduce nuovi flussi crittografici, nuove interazioni tra client e server, nuovi percorsi di codice che espandono la superficie d’attacco. “Il codice diventa più complesso e confuso, e amplia i potenziali vettori per gli hacker”, spiega Matteo Scarlata, dottorando dell’Applied Cryptography Group che ha condotto parte degli attacchi. Un ulteriore problema è l’inerzia tecnologica: molti provider continuano a usare primitive crittografiche degli anni ’90, obsolete secondo gli standard attuali, con la motivazione dichiarata che gli aggiornamenti possano impedire ai clienti di accedere ai propri dati. Un timore comprensibile perché perdere l’accesso a migliaia di credenziali aziendali sarebbe catastrofico, ma che non può giustificare indefinitamente l’uso di crittografia vulnerabile. I ricercatori hanno ovviamente seguito il processo di responsible disclosure contattando i tre provider 90 giorni prima della pubblicazione dei risultati della loro ricerca. Bitwarden, LastPass e Dashlane hanno risposto in modo cooperativo, ma con tempi di remediation diversi e non tutte le vulnerabilità risultano corrette al momento della pubblicazione della ricerca. Tutti i dettagli tecnici sono disponibili nel paper di ricerca, di seguito riportiamo una sintesi sui dati più importanti: Bitwarden, 12 vulnerabilità. Bitwarden, il più popolare tra i password manager open source e molto diffuso in ambito Enterprise grazie alla sua opzione self-hosted, presenta il maggior numero di vulnerabilità documentate: 12. La nature open source del codice non ha impedito queste falle, a dimostrazione che la trasparenza del codice non è sufficiente senza un’analisi crittografica formale sistematica. LastPass, 7 vulnerabilità. LastPass si conferma ancora una volta sotto i riflettori negativi. I 7 attacchi documentati includono scenari di compromissione completa del vault. Il precedente storico rende questa notizia particolarmente significativa per le organizzazioni che non hanno ancora migrato a soluzioni alternative. Dashlane, 6 vulnerabilità. Spesso considerato il password manager più orientato alla sicurezza tra i tre, presenta 6 vulnerabilità. Meno degli altri, ma sufficiente a dimostrare che nessun provider analizzato può attualmente garantire le promesse di sicurezza assoluta presenti nei propri materiali di marketing. Prima di cedere al panico e di cancellare in massa gli account sui password manager è necessario inquadrare correttamente la portata della ricerca. Le vulnerabilità documentate richiedono che un attaccante abbia già compromesso i server del provider. Non si tratta di exploit eseguibili da remoto senza accesso all’infrastruttura, né di falle nel client locale. Questo, tuttavia, non riduce la gravità del problema per due ragioni fondamentali. Innanzitutto, gli attacchi ai server di password manager sono già avvenuti (LastPass 2022 docet) e rappresentano target ad alto valore per gruppi APT e criminali organizzati. La seconda ragione è la promessa zero-knowledge su cui si basa l’intera proposta di valore di questi servizi e che presuppone che anche un server compromesso non metta a rischio i dati degli utenti. Questa promessa è ora formalmente falsificata. La conclusione di Sandro Sana è perentoria: “Per le aziende la morale è semplice: le credenziali privilegiate non stanno in un vault cloud “perché è comodo”, stanno sotto PAM/controlli dedicati e con segmentazione seria. I password manager restano utili, ma da oggi vanno trattati come infrastruttura critica, non come app da smartphone con la password Master123!”. Il professor Paterson raccomanda di scegliere un password manager che sia trasparente riguardo alle vulnerabilità, sottoposto ad audit esterni regolari e con la cifratura end-to-end abilitata per impostazione predefinita. Di seguito riportiamo anche alcuni criteri concreti per orientare la scelta: Preferire provider che pubblicano regolarmente report di audit di terze parti (es. Cure53, NCC Group, Trail of Bits). Verificare che la cifratura E2E sia attiva di default, non come funzionalità opzionale. Valutare soluzioni self-hosted (es. Bitwarden self-hosted, Vaultwarden) se avete le competenze tecniche per gestirle: eliminano il vettore “server compromesso dal provider”. Abilitare l’autenticazione a più fattori (MFA) sul vault: non risolve le vulnerabilità strutturali, ma riduce significativamente il rischio di accesso non autorizzato. Utilizzare master password robuste e uniche, ossia non riutilizzate altrove. Audit dell’inventario: censire tutti i password manager in uso (sia approvati che shadow IT). Classificazione del rischio: le credenziali di sistemi critici (directory, firewall, cloud IAM) non dovrebbero essere esclusivamente protette da password manager cloud-based senza controlli aggiuntivi. Segmentazione delle credenziali: usare soluzioni enterprise on-premise o PAM (Privileged Access Management) per le credenziali privilegiate, riservando i password manager cloud agli accessi meno sensibili. Formazione: comunicare internamente la notizia evitando allarmismo eccessivo, ma sensibilizzando sulla natura reale delle garanzie offerte dai vendor. Monitoring: implementare alerting su accessi anomali ai vault aziendali. Inventariate quali password manager cloud-based sono in uso nella vostra organizzazione. Verificate se tra i provider in uso figurano Bitwarden (cloud), LastPass o Dashlane. Valutate se avete abilitato funzionalità di sharing, family/team plan o recovery account: queste aumentano la superficie d’attacco. Richiedete ai vendor una comunicazione ufficiale sulle patch rilasciate in risposta alla ricerca ETH. Considerare un audit crittografico formale del password manager aziendale se trattate dati critici o regolamentati (NIS2, GDPR, settore bancario/sanitario). Il team ETH non si è limitato a documentare le vulnerabilità, ma ha fornito indicazioni concrete per migliorare la sicurezza del settore. La proposta centrale di Scarlata è pragmatica: aggiornare gradualmente i sistemi per i nuovi clienti secondo gli standard crittografici più recenti, in particolare l’adozione di schemi autenticati e resistenti alla manipolazione come AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) in modalità binding robuste. È importante, inoltre, abbandonare le primitive crittografiche legacy degli anni ’90. Per i clienti esistenti, la proposta è offrire una migrazione volontaria al nuovo sistema, con piena trasparenza sulle vulnerabilità del sistema attuale. Un approccio che rispetta sia le esigenze di continuità del servizio sia il diritto degli utenti di fare scelte informate. “Vogliamo che il nostro lavoro contribuisca a cambiare questo settore”, ha dichiarato Paterson. “I provider di password manager non dovrebbero fare false promesse ai propri clienti riguardo alla sicurezza, ma comunicare in modo più chiaro e preciso quali garanzie le loro soluzioni offrono davvero.” È un principio che va ben oltre i password manager: si applica a qualsiasi prodotto di sicurezza che fa marketing basato su garanzie crittografiche. Trasparenza, audit indipendenti e standard aggiornati non sono optional: sono precondizioni per la fiducia. Ci sono altre due considerazioni importanti da fare a commento di questa notizia. La prima è che i password manager non sono tutti uguali: ce ne sono molte decine reperibili sugli store, ma alcuni sono migliori di altri. Avendo personalmente testato molti password manager ritengo che 1Password sia uno dei migliori (come interfaccia e funzionalità) ma soprattutto uno dei più sicuri. E anche lo studio condotto da ETH Zurich lo conferma: 1Password nei loro test ha dimostrato una resistenza maggiore rispetto ai suoi concorrenti. Ciò è dovuto in gran parte all’uso di una “chiave segreta” ad alta entropia combinata con la password principale dell’utente durante la crittografia. 1Password combina infatti la sicurezza della funzione PBKDF2 con l’uso della chiave segreta (Secret Key). Questa offre una protezione aggiuntiva e più forte qualora i server di 1Password dovessero essere violati. La Secret Key, lunga oltre 30 caratteri, viene creata nel browser o nel client 1Password sul computer dell’utente quando questi crea il suo account 1Password. Tutto ciò avviene interamente sul computer dell’utente e non viene inviato ai server di 1Password, che quindi non conosce la Secret Key. Questo ulteriore livello di sicurezza aumenta significativamente la resistenza agli attacchi di forza bruta, con i ricercatori che osservano che tali attacchi sarebbero “fuori portata” in condizioni normali. La seconda considerazione è più generale: l’autenticazione con password è comunque intrinsecamente debole: come ha ribadito il NIST nel suo recente documento SP 800-63-4 la password non è un’autenticazione resistente al phishing. Quindi dobbiamo andare verso soluzioni diverse dalla password, che peraltro già esistono: per esempio le Passkeys. È un progetto presentato da Apple, Google e Microsoft sotto l’egida della Fido Alliance oltre tre anni fa, nel maggio 2022. Passkeys rappresenta una soluzione di autenticazione sicura e “passwordless”, basata sulla biometria e sulla crittografia asimmetrica. Ma nella mia attività di consulente aziendale constato che il tasso di adozione di questa soluzione è ancora molto basso e fatica a crescere. Esiste, quindi, un problema culturale di fondo – e a tutti i livelli – sull’uso dei sistemi di autenticazione e sulla consapevolezza della loro importanza. Giorgio Sbaraglia I password manager rimangono strumenti preziosi e, per la maggior parte degli utenti, rappresentano un significativo miglioramento rispetto all’alternativa di usare password deboli o riutilizzate. Nulla in questa ricerca suggerisce di abbandonarli in massa. Quello che cambia – e che deve cambiare – è il contesto di fiducia. Le promesse di sicurezza assoluta, di zero-knowledge totale, di “nemmeno noi possiamo accedere ai vostri dati” devono essere sostituite da comunicazioni più oneste, audit pubblici regolari e aggiornamenti crittografici sistematici. Come professionisti della sicurezza, dobbiamo dunque trasmettere ai nostri clienti e stakeholder un messaggio equilibrato: i password manager sono strumenti con un profilo di rischio specifico, come qualsiasi altro strumento. Comprenderlo ci rende più sicuri, non meno. [1] ETH Zurich: “Password managers less secure than promised”. [2] Scarlata M, Torrisi G, Backendal M, Paterson K: “Zero Knowledge (About) Encryption” — USENIX Security 2026, preprint.

Self-spreading npm malware targets developers in new supply chain attack Security researchers have uncovered another supply chain attack targeting developers: 19 typosquatting npm packages published on npmjs.com that steal credentials, infect projects, and propagate themselves across developer environments. The operation, dubbed “SANDWORM_MODE,” represents a (still) rare example of worm-like malware designed to spread through software supply chains rather than traditional end-user systems. New npm worm builds on Shai-Hulud’s playbook After last year’s bombshell appearance of the self-replicating “Shai-Hulud” worm on the official npm registry, the emergence of this campaign shouldn’t come as a shock. “Whether this worm represents a direct descendant or a copycat, it stays consistent with the Dune flavored theming seen in Shai-Hulud analysis and bakes it into operator controls, including Sandworm themed SANDWORM_* environment variable switches that gate behavior at runtime,” the Socket research team noted. Unlike that previous campaign, this one leverages typosquatting npm packages impersonating popular utilities (e.g., AI coding tools like Claude Code, OpenClaw, supports-color, crypto tools) and preserves the expected behavior of the impersonated libraries. The packages were published by two accounts, using npm publisher aliases official334 and javaorg. Once imported by developers, the malicious npm packages: Execute a hidden loader that decrypts embedded code Search for and exfiltrate sensitive data: API keys and access tokens, .npmrc credentials, SSH keys, environment variables, and cryptocurrency wallet keys (the latter are the first data to be exfiltrated, within seconds of installation) Delay the execution of the second stage by 48 to 96 hours, depending on the host. The exception is if the loader detects continuous integration (CI) environments (GITHUB_ACTIONS, GITLAB_CI, CIRCLECI, JENKINS_URL, BUILDKITE), when it foregoes this delay Decrypt and run the second stage module, then start another round of harvesting of sensitive information. “Stage 2 performs deep harvesting: password managers (Bitwarden, 1Password, LastPass via their respective CLIs), local SQLite stores (Apple Notes, macOS Messages, Joplin, clipboard history), and a full filesystem scan for wallet files and crypto configs beyond the working directory,” the researchers shared. “It then exfiltrates all collected data npm/GitHub tokens, environment secrets, proxy credentials, .npmrc credentials, crypto artifacts, LLM API keys, and propagation results through three channels in cascade: HTTPS POST to a Cloudflare Worker at https://pkg-metrics[.]official334[.]workers[.]dev/exfil; authenticated GitHub API uploads to threat actor-created private repositories using double-base64 encoding; and DNS tunneling via base32-encoded queries to freefan[.]net (primary) and fanfree[.]net (secondary), with a DGA fallback seeded by ‘sw2025’ that generates domains across ten TLDs.” The second stage module also performs propagation actions, establishes persistence, and performs MCP server injection. It scans the local machine for Git repositories and authentication tokens for services like GitHub or npm, and if it finds usable credentials, it automatically modifies project files to include a malicious package. It then pushes those changes or publishes compromised packages using the victim’s own account. To make sure it survives cleanup attempts, the malware installs a malicious Git hook, which can re-download or re-execute the malicious payload whenever the developer works on code. The malware also targets modern AI coding assistants – Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code Continue, and Windsurf/Codeium – by injecting a rogue Model Context Protocol (MCP) server into their configuration. This allows the threat actor to feed hidden instructions to the assistant, prompting it to read sensitive files and transmit their contents externally. “As a secondary collection step, the module also harvests API keys for nine LLM providers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Together, Fireworks, Replicate, Mistral, and Cohere, from environment variables and .env files, validating each against its known format regex,” the researchers added. Finally, the malware contains a built-in self-mutation system, but it’s switched off in this version. What should victims do? After Socket alerted the relevant providers, coordinated takedown actions quickly disrupted the campaign’s infrastructure: Cloudflare shut down network services the attackers were using to receive stolen data and control infected systems, GitHub removed repositories and accounts linked to the operation, and npm deleted the malicious packages from its registry. Socket has published a list of the known malicious npm packages and has advised developers affected by this supply chain attack to: Remove any malicious packages they installed and delete the node_modules/ directory Treat any system where the packages ran (developer machine or CI environment) as potentially compromised, and rotate all potentially exposed credentials (including npm tokens, GitHub tokens, and CI/CD secrets) Review recent changes to package.json, lockfiles, and .github/workflows/ for suspicious or unexpected additions Check for persistence mechanisms by auditing global Git hook templates and inspecting hook directories for unfamiliar scripts, and examine local AI coding assistant configuration files for unexpected or unknown mcpServers entries. Subscribe to our breaking news e-mail alert to never miss out on the latest breaches, vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. Subscribe here!

On the Security of Password Managers Good article on password managers that secretly have a backdoor. New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups. The researchers reverse-engineered or closely analyzed Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass and identified ways that someone with control over the server—either administrative or the result of a compromise—can, in fact, steal data and, in some cases, entire vaults. The researchers also devised other attacks that can weaken the encryption to the point that ciphertext can be converted to plaintext. This is where I plug my own Password Safe. It isn’t as full-featured as the others and it doesn’t use the cloud at all, but it’s actual encryption with no recovery features.

Design weaknesses in major password managers enable vault attacks, researchers say Can cloud-based password managers that claim “zero-knowledge encryption” keep users’ passwords safe even if their encrypted-vault servers are compromised? Researchers at ETH Zurich and Università della Svizzera italiana set out to answer that question, and the answer is (unfortunately) no. Attack paths against encrypted vaults Cloud-based password managers store users’s passwords in a password vault, which is created and encrypted by the user’s client software by using a cryptographic key derived from the user’s master password. The client software uploads the encrypted vault to a server run by the service provider and the provider can’t decrypt it. Only the user’s client software can: it retrieves the vault and uses the user’s master password to decrypt it locally (i.e., on the user’s device). But, as the researchers demonstrated, attackers who manage to compromise a server that stores the password vaults can, in some cases, recover users’ passwords, fully compromise the vault, modify its contents, and more. The researchers probed four popular password managers: Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane, and 1Password. They presented 12 distinct attack scenarios against Bitwarden, 7 against LastPass, 6 against Dashlane, and 3 against 1Password. The attacks are grouped in four categories, depending on the password manager feature they exploit: Key escrow (used for vault recovery, in case the user forgets their master password, or for account recovery), Item-level vault encryption (data items in the vault and user settings are encrypted as separate objects, and often combined with unencrypted or unauthenticated metadata) Credential sharing Backwards compatibility (to support older software client versions) Across these categories, they found that design weaknesses – such as missing key authentication, lack of authenticated encryption, poor key separation, and legacy cryptographic support – can allow attackers who tamper with server-stored data to manipulate keys, metadata, or ciphertext. In many cases, these flaws can lead to severe outcomes such as full vault compromise, loss of confidentiality, or loss of integrity. Importantly, several attacks require little or no user interaction (sometimes just a login or sync) and affect multiple products studied. “We were surprised by the severity of the security vulnerabilities,” said Prof. Dr. Kenneth Paterson, from the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich. “Since end-to-end encryption is still relatively new in commercial services, it seems that no one had ever examined it in detail before.” (Some) fixes are available The researchers proposed a set of changes that can be implemented to mitigate all of these attacks, but noted vendors’ reluctance to introduce changes that would break functionality or, at worst, lead to irretrievable loss of access to vaults/passwords. “To this aim, we propose the use of specialized password manager clients, with no functionality besides implementing a forced migration to the new vault format. This would prevent any user from losing access to their data, while preserving security for the entire user base,” the researchers advised. The four affected vendors were appraised of the research many months before it was made public. They have since moved to fix some of these exploitable design flaws, while pointing out that others – like the verification of public key authenticity – are industry‑wide challenges that are yet to be successfuly solved. While they all pointed out that this research was valuable to help them keep their users safe, they noted that they have found no indication that any of these attacks have been successfully leveraged to compromise their customers. The researchers themselves noted that while most users are unlikely to be targeted via the attacks they presented, as they require considerable skills and knowledge from the attackers, but higher risk individuals and organizations might be. “Unfortunately, we cannot exclude the possibility that our attacks were already known to advanced threat actors – after all, we have learned from the Snowden revelations that national security agencies are routinely tasked with penetrating systems like the ones we analyse and are willing to conduct active attacks on targets,” they said. “The best mitigation for these parties is to trust that vendors will rapidly and effectively patch their systems, and here we have made real effort to engage with the affected vendors to assist them in this process.” UPDATE (February 17, 2026, 02:00 p.m. ET): “Our security team reviewed the paper in depth and found no new attack vectors beyond those already documented in our publicly available Security Design White Paper,” 1Password’s CISO/CIO Jacob DePriest told Help Net Security. “We are committed to continually strengthening our security architecture and evaluating it against advanced threat models, including malicious-server scenarios like those described in the research, and evolving it over time to maintain the protections our users rely on,” he added. “For example, 1Password uses Secure Remote Password (SRP) to authenticate users without transmitting encryption keys to our servers, helping mitigate entire classes of server-side attacks. More recently, we introduced a new capability for enterprise-managed credentials, which from the start are created and secured to withstand sophisticated threats.” Subscribe to our breaking news e-mail alert to never miss out on the latest breaches, vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. Subscribe here!

A team of security researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland has analyzed popular password managers and identified ways in which threat actors could compromise users’ vaults and access sensitive data. However, the researchers did not test the password managers against external or client-side attacks. Instead they targeted zero-knowledge encryption, a security model where the service provider is unable to access the user’s encrypted data and the data should be protected even if the provider’s servers are compromised. As such, the ETH Zurich researchers conducted an analysis of popular cloud-based password managers under the assumption that the servers storing user vaults are “fully malicious”. The researchers targeted password managers from Bitwarden, Dashlane, LastPass, and 1Password, each having millions of users and overall accounting for a significant share of the market. Although 1Password was included in the research, the analysis focused on the other password managers. Several types of attacks were conducted against each of the tested password managers to degrade security guarantees, undermine expected protections, and fully compromise user accounts. The experts targeted features used for account recovery and SSO login, as well as features designed for backward compatibility. They conducted attacks leveraging improper vault integrity and attacks enabled by sharing features, which allow families or businesses to use the same credentials. For each of the tested password managers, the researchers managed to achieve vault compromise, including full vault compromise for Bitwarden and LastPass, and shared vault compromise for Dashlane. They demonstrated that in many cases an attacker could not only view users’ credentials but also modify them. Password managers respond Some of the vendors pointed out that the attack methods identified by the researchers require full compromise of a password manager’s servers and advanced skills to conduct cryptographic attacks. Dashlane told SecurityWeek that some of the findings require “either specific circumstances and/or an extremely significant window of time”. The vendors have been notified and rolled out patches and mitigations for many of the vulnerabilities, but pointed out that some issues are difficult to address. “When users share items, symmetric keys are encrypted with the recipient’s public keys. As with most server‑mediated end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) systems, this creates a structural dependency on the authenticity of the public key directory,” Dashlane’s Frederic Rivain explained in a blog post. “If an attacker were able to substitute the user’s public key with their own, the attacker could gain access to the contents of shared items encrypted with the malicious public key.” Rivain added, “This is a known, industry‑wide challenge.” Bitwarden noted that of the 10 issues reported by the researchers — each rated as having medium or low impact — seven have been or are in the process of being addressed. However, three of the flaws “have been accepted as intentional design decisions necessary for product functionality”. LastPass told SecurityWeek that it appreciates the research but also suggested that it disagrees with some of the researchers’ assessments. “While our own assessment of these risks may not fully align with the severity ratings assigned by the ETH Zurich team, we take all reported security findings seriously. We have already implemented multiple near‑term hardening measures while also establishing plans to remediate or reinforce the relevant components of our service on a timeline commensurate with the assessed risk,” a spokesperson stated. [ Read: LastPass Users Targeted With Backup-Themed Phishing Emails ] 1Password has also been analyzed and the researchers managed to achieve full compromise of vault confidentiality and integrity, allowing an attacker to obtain passwords and other sensitive data stored in the vault, as well as to add items to the vault. However, Jacob DePriest, CISO and CIO of 1Password, told SecurityWeek that the attack vectors identified by the researchers had already been documented in the company’s publicly available Security Design White Paper. “We are committed to continually strengthening our security architecture and evaluating it against advanced threat models, including malicious-server scenarios like those described in the research, and evolving it over time to maintain the protections our users rely on,” DePriest said. He added, “For example, 1Password uses Secure Remote Password (SRP) to authenticate users without transmitting encryption keys to our servers, helping mitigate entire classes of server-side attacks. More recently, we introduced a new capability for enterprise-managed credentials, which from the start are created and secured to withstand sophisticated threats.” Related: Password Managers Vulnerable to Data Theft via Clickjacking Related: Analysis of 6 Billion Passwords Shows Stagnant User Behavior

A new study has found that multiple cloud-based password managers, including Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass, are susceptible to password recovery attacks under certain conditions. "The attacks range in severity from integrity violations to the complete compromise of all vaults in an organization," researchers Matteo Scarlata, Giovanni Torrisi, Matilda Backendal, and Kenneth G. Paterson said. "The majority of the attacks allow the recovery of passwords." It's worth noting that the threat model, per the study from ETH Zurich and Università della Svizzera italiana, supposes a malicious server and aims to examine the password manager's zero-knowledge encryption (ZKE) promises made by the three solutions. ZKE is a cryptographic technique that allows one party to prove knowledge of a secret to another party without actually revealing the secret itself. ZKE is also a little different from end-to-end encryption (E2EE). While E2EE refers to a method of securing data in transit, ZKE is mainly about storing data in an encrypted format such that only the person with the key can access that information. Password manager vendors are known to implement ZKE to "enhance" user privacy and security by ensuring that the vault data cannot be tampered with. However, the latest research has uncovered 12 distinct attacks against Bitwarden, seven against LastPass, and six against Dashlane, ranging from integrity violations of targeted user vaults to a total compromise of all the vaults associated with an organization. Collectively, these password management solutions serve over 60 million users and nearly 125,000 businesses. "Despite vendors' attempts to achieve security in this setting, we uncover several common design anti-patterns and cryptographic misconceptions that resulted in vulnerabilities," the researchers said in an accompanying paper. The attacks fall under four broad categories - Attacks that exploit the "Key Escrow" account recovery mechanism to compromise the confidentiality guarantees of Bitwarden and LastPass, resulting from vulnerabilities in their key escrow designs. Attacks that exploit flawed item-level encryption -- i.e., encrypting data items and sensitive user settings as separate objects and often combine with unencrypted or unauthenticated metadata, to result in integrity violations, metadata leakage, field swapping, and key derivation function (KDF) downgrade. Attacks that exploit sharing features to compromise vault integrity and confidentiality. Attacks that exploit backwards compatibility with legacy code that result in downgrade attacks in Bitwarden and Dashlane. The study also found that 1Password, another popular password manager, is vulnerable to both item-level vault encryption and sharing attacks. However, 1Password has opted to treat them as arising from already known architectural limitations. When reached for comment, Jacob DePriest, Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Information Officer at 1Password, told The Hacker News that the company's security reviewed the paper in detail and found no new attack vectors beyond those already documented in its publicly available Security Design White Paper. "We are committed to continually strengthening our security architecture and evaluating it against advanced threat models, including malicious-server scenarios like those described in the research, and evolving it over time to maintain the protections our users rely on," DePriest added. "For example, 1Password uses Secure Remote Password (SRP) to authenticate users without transmitting encryption keys to our servers, helping mitigate entire classes of server-side attacks. More recently, we introduced a new capability for enterprise-managed credentials, which from the start are created and secured to withstand sophisticated threats." As for the rest, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass have all implemented countermeasures to mitigate the risks highlighted in the research, with LastPass also planning to harden its admin password reset and sharing workflows to counter the threat posed by a malicious intermediary. There is no evidence that any of these issues has been exploited in the wild. Specifically, Dashlane has patched an issue where a successful compromise of its servers could have allowed a downgrade of the encryption model used to generate encryption keys and protect user vaults. The issue was fixed by removing support for legacy cryptography methods with Dashlane Extension version 6.2544.1 released in November 2025. "This downgrade could result in the compromise of a weak or easily guessable Master Password, and the compromise of individual 'downgraded' vault items," Dashlane said. "This issue was the result of the allowed use of legacy cryptography. This legacy cryptography was supported by Dashlane in certain cases for backwards compatibility and migration flexibility." Bitwarden said all identified issues are being addressed. "Seven of which have been resolved or are in active remediation by the Bitwarden team," it said. "The remaining three issues have been accepted as intentional design decisions necessary for product functionality." In a similar advisory, LastPass said it's "actively working to add stronger integrity guarantees to better cryptographically bind items, fields, and metadata, thereby helping to maintain integrity assurance."

A group of academic security researchers have detailed a set of vulnerabilities in four popular cloud-based password managers that could allow an attacker to view and change the passwords stored in a victim’s vaults. The researchers, from ETH Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), in Switzerland, developed 27 successful attack scenarios targeting cloud-based password management services from Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password. The attacks ranged in severity from integrity violations to the complete compromise of all vaults in an organization, with many of these scenarios allowing attackers to recover passwords. These attack scenarios challenged the password management providers’ claims of offering ‘zero-knowledge encryption,’ which conveys the idea that the server storing the user vaults cannot learn anything about its contents, even if it is compromised. The findings were published in a peer-reviewed paper released on February 16 and will be the subject of a talk at the next USENIX Security Symposium, which will be held in Baltimore, MD in August 2026. Attacking End-to-End Encryption Claims The 27 attack scenarios developed by the researchers revealed common design anti-patterns and cryptographic misconceptions, including unauthenticated public keys, lack of ciphertext integrity, insufficient key separation and missing cryptographic binding between data and metadata. They fell into four categories based on the password manager feature they exploited: Key escrow: full vault compromise via unauthenticated key escrow and account recovery features (four successful attacks: three against Bitwarden, one against LastPass) Vault encryption: integrity violations, metadata leakage, field swapping and key derivation function (KDF) downgrade through flawed item-level encryption (11 successful attacks: five against LastPass, four against Bitwarden, one against Dashlane and one against 1Password) Sharing: organization and shared vault compromise via unauthenticated public keys (five successful attacks: two against Bitwarden, one against LastPass, one against Dashlane, one against 1Password) Backwards compatibility: downgrade to insecure legacy encryption, enabling confidentiality loss and brute-force attacks (seven successful attacks: four against Dashlane, three against Bitwarden) In total, the researchers presented 12 distinct attack scenarios against Bitwarden, seven against LastPass, six against Dashlane and two against 1Password. They noted that, unlike the other three password managers, 1Password includes a high-entropy cryptographic key in the key derivation – which the company calls a “secret key” – alongside the master password a user needs to access its vaults and passwords. This grants 1Password with a security advantage and means “brute-force attacks should be out of reach,” the researchers added. Kenneth Paterson, professor at ETH Zurich’s Department of Computer Science and one of the lead authors of the paper, said that he and his colleagues were “surprised by the severity of the security vulnerabilities.” He explained that his team had already discovered similar vulnerabilities in other cloud-based services but had assumed a significantly higher standard of security for password managers due to the critical data they store. “Since end-to-end encryption is still relatively new in commercial services, it seems that no one had ever examined it in detail before,” he said. Malicious Auto-Enrolment Against Bitwarden An example of an attack developed by the researchers was a ‘malicious auto-enrolment’ attack against a cloud-based Bitwarden vault (BW01). This exploited a critical flaw in Bitwarden’s organization onboarding process, where an adversary controlling the server could silently hijack a user’s vault the moment they accepted an invitation, even from a trusted source. The core issue was in the lack of integrity protection for organization data fetched during onboarding, including policies and cryptographic keys. When a user joins an organization, their client blindly trusts the server’s response, allowing an attacker to manipulate it. By enabling auto-enrolment in the account recovery policy and swapping the organization’s legitimate public key with their own, an attacker could force the client to encrypt the user’s master key under the malicious key, handing it over without resistance. The attack unfolds in three key steps. The adversary intercepts the user’s request to join the organization, replacing the server’s response with a tampered policy (setting auto-enrolment to true) and a forged public key The client, unaware of the deception, encrypts the user’s master key under the attacker’s key and sends it back as an ‘account recovery ciphertext’ Finally, the attacker decrypts this ciphertext using their private key, exposing the master key With the user’s master key in hand, the attacker could gain full access to all stored passwords, notes, and sensitive data, as well as the ability to modify or delete entries undetected. The impact can be severe: a single compromised server can lead to the mass compromise of users, even if they join legitimate, trusted organizations. Worse, the attack scales exponentially. If an attacker breaches one user in an organization, they gain access to the organisation’s private key, which could be shared among several members of their team. Remediation Underway at Bitwarden, LastPass and Dashlane The researchers disclosed their findings to Bitwarden, LastPass and Dashlane through a coordinated 90-day disclosure process that included detailed descriptions of all vulnerabilities. They also offered support through video conferences, email exchanges and patch review. All three vendors notified the researchers that remediation of these vulnerabilities is underway. 1Password, also made aware of the two attack scenarios performed by the researchers against their services, did not request an embargo period but said the company regards the vulnerabilities as “arising from already known architectural limitations.” Jacob DePriest, CISO/CIO at 1Password told Infosecurity that the firm's security team reviewed the paper in depth and found no new attack vectors beyond those already documented in their publicly available Security Design White Paper. He also explained that 1Password regularly evaluates the company's security architecture against advanced threat models, including malicious-server scenarios like those described in the research, and evolve it when needed. "For example, 1Password uses secure remote password (SRP) to authenticate users without transmitting encryption keys to our servers, helping mitigate entire classes of server-side attacks. More recently, we introduced a new capability for enterprise-managed credentials, which from the start are created and secured to withstand sophisticated threats," DePriest added. Dashlane shared a blog post addressing the paper’s findings and detailing a fix the firm deployed to mitigate the issue. LastPass said the company was "grateful" for the research. "While our own assessment of these risks may not fully align with the severity ratings assigned by the ETH Zurich team, we take all reported security findings seriously," a LastPass spokesperson told Infosecurity. "We have already implemented multiple near‑term hardening measures while also establishing plans to remediate or reinforce the relevant components of our service on a timeline commensurate with the assessed risk.” The ETH Zurich researchers noted that they have “no reason to believe” that the password manager vendors are currently malicious or compromised and that passwords “are safe as long as things stay that way.” “That said, password managers are high-value targets, and breaches do happen,” the researchers added. Additionally, a Dashlane spokesperson told Infosecurity it found no evidence of exploitation related to these issues. Mitigation Recommendations In the scientific paper, the researchers said their attacks can all be mitigated using a combination of authentication methods, such as authentication encryption, key separation, plaintext authentication, public key authentication and ciphertext authentication. Users of Bitwarden, LastPass or Dashlane are advised to check the remediation status of their providers. Users of other password managers can see if their passwords could be compromised by similar attacks by asking their providers to commission an audit or asking the following questions: Do you offer end-to-end encryption? What security do you provide in case your server infrastructure was to be compromised? How do you check that public keys and public-key ciphertexts are authentic? How do you authenticate security-critical settings, such as the KDF type and the iteration count? Do you provide integrity guarantees for a user's vault as a whole? Can a malicious server add items to your vault? The article was updated on February 17 to add comments from 1Password and Dashlane and on February 18 to add comments from LastPass.

Bitwarden has launched a new system called ‘Cupid Vault’ that allows users to safely share passwords with trusted email addresses. Cupid Vault works by allowing users of the free version of Bitwarden to create a 2-person shared vault called an 'Organization'. Other users can access the logins inside the Organization space with credentials assigned by the owner of the account. Inviting a user (partner, friend, family member) to an Organization can be done by adding their email address as a second member. This way, Bitwarden users can share in a secure way collections of login pairs for media streaming service accounts or other online platforms. Setting up an Organization and creating shared collections is possible by logging into the Bitwarden vault via the web interface. To prevent adversary-in-the-middle enrollment attacks, vault owners can verify through a fingerprint phrase that the intended member is getting access. The shared vault is completely isolated from the personal vault. Access to the Organization vault and the secrets it contains can be revoked at any time, and sharing can be configured in both directions. Bitwarden published a detailed guide on how to set up and use Cupid Vault, which explains that ownership of items within a new Organization isn’t tied to their creator, as both members can perform editing or deletion actions. Bitwarden is a popular open-source password manager that lets users securely store, generate, and autofill passwords and other sensitive information. It’s cross-platform, supporting a range of browsers, desktop operating systems, and mobile platforms, and protects stored data using end-to-end encryption. The new Cupid Vault feature, launched ahead of Valentine’s Day, is available at no charge to all users and can be set up through the free plan. However, there’s a limit of 2 Collections and 2 users each. Family, Teams, and Enterprise plan users already get multiple users, collections, and granular role-based access control permissions, so Cupid Vault is redundant for paying tiers and shouldn’t be confused with the secret-sharing features available to them. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Bitwarden advances passkeys and credential risk controls Bitwarden revealed continued product innovation and ecosystem maturity to advance identity security capabilities for users and enterprises. Bitwarden introduced enterprise credential risk insights and guided remediation through Bitwarden Access Intelligence, expanded passkey interoperability across browsers, devices, and operating systems, and deepened alignment with industry standards and major platform providers, including the FIDO Alliance and Microsoft. Turning credential risk into guided action Credential-based risks continue to drive security incidents across enterprise and personal environments, often remaining unresolved due to limited visibility and slow remediation. Bitwarden expanded credential risk insights and guided remediation across work and everyday account usage, helping users and organizations move more quickly from identification to action. Bitwarden Access Intelligence delivers application-level visibility into weak, reused, or exposed credentials tied to business-critical systems, paired with guided remediation at scale. Findings from the Bitwarden Business Insights Report show credential issues take an average of nine days to resolve, while 60% of organizations cite remediation barriers. Access Intelligence prioritizes risk by context and severity and directs employees to the correct password update flows, reducing remediation friction at scale. Vault health alerts and password coaching extend similar visibility to individual users by surfacing at-risk passwords directly within the browser extension, web app, and desktop applications. These capabilities guide users to strong, unique replacements saved securely to the vault, addressing persistent password reuse, which Bitwarden polling shows affects 72% of Gen Z adults despite rising awareness of AI-enabled phishing and automated credential harvesting. These capabilities reflect a more cohesive approach to credential risk management, supporting faster action and stronger identity security outcomes across personal and organizational use cases. Advancing passkey innovation and interoperability Passkey adoption continued to accelerate as Bitwarden expanded support across operating systems, browsers, and open standards, reinforcing a passwordless future built on portability and phishing-resistant authentication. Deeper collaboration with platform providers and standards helped reduce fragmentation across environments, while bringing passkey-based access into everyday workflows for individuals and organizations alike. Key passkey advancements included: Cross-platform passkey portability, supported through ongoing contributions to the FIDO Credential Exchange Protocol, enabling secure passkey transfer and recovery across devices, services, and ecosystems. Native Windows 11 passkey support, delivered in collaboration with Microsoft, empowering users and organizations to store and use passkeys directly within the Windows operating system while managing them through the Bitwarden vault. Passkey login for browser extensions, extending passwordless authentication to Chromium-based browsers using the WebAuthn PRF standard and bringing phishing-resistant access into one of the most frequently used platforms. These efforts reflect a broader industry shift toward identity-centric authentication grounded in open standards and passwordless innovation. Extending secure access and control across environments Bitwarden expanded secure access into AI-assisted and automated management with strong control and governance. The Bitwarden Model Context Protocol (MCP) server established a secure, local-first framework for integrating AI assistants with encrypted Bitwarden operations. Designed to run on local machines or controlled environments, the MCP server enables AI agents to generate, retrieve, and manage Bitwarden through authenticated CLI and API access without exposing raw secrets or compromising a zero-knowledge encryption architecture. This framework extends to prompt-driven workflows for tasks such as device approvals, user management, and policy enforcement under explicit IT oversight. All actions remain auditable through event logs, reinforcing transparency and control as organizations explore practical, security-first approaches to AI-assisted identity workflows. Additional product and ecosystem enhancements throughout the year further strengthened secure access and usability across platforms: General availability of Bitwarden lite self-host deployment, offering a lightweight, flexible option for individuals and community members. Introduction of the Bitwarden SSH Agent, extending secure credential handling to developer and infrastructure workflows. ISO 27001 certification, reinforcing enterprise assurance around security governance and operational controls. Expanded ecosystem availability, including Bitwarden Password Manager support for the Meta Quest VR headset browser, enabling secure credential access within immersive web experiences. Completion of native mobile application general availability, delivering full native app support across iOS and Android with improved performance and platform-level integration.

ai and ML AI slop is good for business if you know what you're doingYour irresponsibility is someone else's opportunity SAAS Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report saysShow us the money ai and ml AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTCFahrenheit 203, the temperature GPUs stop gorging on literature DEVOPS Go updates may delight diehard gophers but displease AI overlordsv 1.27 expands generics to support methods EDGE AND IOT Waymo has designed a robocar chip to stay ahead of Tesla5 nm ML accelerators promise 1,000+ TOPS, ultra-low latency Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacksPLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attackPLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructureVoting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz AcronisWent at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sightOn the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash anotherWord up GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensionsNew 'Simple-taskbar' is an option, but there's a simpler, stabler way A moment of silence, please, for the final release of Debian on x86-32New Debian versions hit FOSSland in the form of 13.6 and 12.15 Baddies caught exploiting extensions bugs with perfect 10 scores on vulnerable Joomla websitesFlaws in iCagenda, Balbooa Forms extensions can impact open source CMS that powers a million sites worldwide Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assemblyJoins yserver, Phoenix, and of course XLibre – and outlier Arcan Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want itNext version of Linux Mint’s desktop has both kinds of display server

Bitwarden Access Intelligence helps enterprises take action on risky credentials Bitwarden announced Bitwarden Access Intelligence for Enterprise plans. Access Intelligence provides visibility into weak, reused, or exposed credentials across critical applications, with guided remediation workflows for consistent credential updates at scale. The capability helps IT and security teams prioritize and address credential risks while enabling employees to take action through simple, in-context update prompts, strengthening overall enterprise security practices. Credential compromise remains the leading security risk Credential misuse remains the most common cause of security incidents. Industry research shows a significant share of breaches originate from password reuse, weak credentials, and phishing attempts that mimic trusted services through malicious login prompts. These risks grow as application ecosystems expand and workforces remain distributed, increasing reliance on individual users to manage access across numerous applications, including unmanaged or shadow IT environments. Findings from the Bitwarden Business Insights Report show that: Credential issues historically take an average of 9 days to resolve once identified 60% of organizations previously cite barriers to credential remediation effectiveness 48% of IT leaders report prior difficulty monitoring password health across their organizations These conditions create operational challenges for IT and security teams and expand the attack surface, increasing the likelihood of credential compromise. Even when risks are identified, the lack of scalable remediation tools makes it difficult to drive timely credential updates across the workforce. App-centric prioritization and guided workflows drive employee-led risk reduction Access Intelligence provides application-level visibility into weak, reused, or exposed credentials across the organization, including those tied to business-critical systems. This application-centric approach surfaces specific sensitive systems, enabling IT and security teams to easily prioritize remediation. Guided workflows prompt employees to update affected credentials directly in the browser extension, automatically routing them to the correct password change form for each at-risk application. This streamlines the remediation process and increases completion rates, reducing the volume of unresolved credential risks. Email notifications emphasize timely action when needed. Together, these workflows reduce IT workload and limit ticket escalation while reinforcing shared responsibility for secure access practices. Measuring progress and improving security posture over time Access Intelligence enables IT and security teams to monitor credential remediation and track improvements company-wide. Administrators can review progress as employees complete guided updates, helping teams measure credential risk reduction and identify areas requiring additional support. This ensures remediation leads to measurable security improvements and consistently supports secure identity access habits. Availability Bitwarden Access Intelligence is available for Enterprise plans and is accessible through the Bitwarden web app via the admin console.

Microsoft announced that passwordless authentication is now easier on Windows 11 through native support for third-party passkey managers, the first ones supported being 1Password and Bitwarden. This is possible after the Windows security team worked together with third-party managers to improve passwordless authentication by developing a passkey API for Windows 11. The new feature has been introduced with the November 2025 security update for Windows 11, released yesterday. Passkeys are a secure authentication mechanism that follows the FIDO2/WebAuthn standards, utilizing private-public key cryptography for local challenge signing and server-side verification, rather than passwords. When users register on a passkey-enabled site or app, Windows generates a key pair, with the private key securely stored on Microsoft Password Manager, 1Password, or Bitwarden. From then on, when attempting to log in on that site or app, a challenge is served to Windows, and the user is requested to verify themselves using Windows Hello, which is protected by PIN and biometrics authentication. The system is considered superior to passwords due to its portability, higher convenience for users, and immunity to phishing attacks. Microsoft has been pushing the adoption of passkeys on Windows, and the addition of third-party app support via the new API adds more flexibility for users. In addition to the third-party app support, Microsoft has also integrated Microsoft Password Manager from Microsoft Edge natively into Windows as a plugin to allow users to choose their passkey manager. Microsoft highlights the following security benefits for this development: Passkey creation, authentication, and management are protected by Windows Hello Syncing is available across Windows devices when signed into Edge with the same Microsoft account Syncing is protected by the manager PIN and a cloud enclave Azure Managed Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) safeguard encryption keys Sensitive operations run in Azure Confidential Compute Recovery uses Azure Confidential Ledger Microsoft Edge introduced passkey saving and syncing with Microsoft Password Manager earlier this month, in version 142 and later, for Windows 10 and above. Bitwarden has supported passkey storage and management since November 2023 and introduced “Log in with Passkeys” in January 2024. The popular password manager announced the Windows 11 integration via an update on its original feature launch announcement, noting that its system-level integration on the OS is currently at beta stage. This means that there may be functional limitations or potential instability until sufficient broad-scale testing and bug fixing happens. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

LastPass has alerted users about a new phishing attack that claims the recipient has died. According to the message, a family member has submitted a death certificate to gain access to the recipient’s password vault. A link in the phishing email, supposedly to stop the request, leads to a fake page that asks for the LastPass user’s master password. “Legacy Request Opened (URGENT IF YOU ARE NOT DECEASED) A death certificate was uploaded by a family member to regain access to the Lastpass account If you have not passed away and you believe this is a mistake, please reply to this email with STOP” LastPass links this campaign to CryptoChameleon (also known as UNC5356), a group that previously targeted cryptocurrency users and platforms with similar social engineering attacks. The same group used LastPass branding in a phishing kit in April 2024. The phishing attempt exploits the legitimate inheritance process, which is an emergency access feature in LastPass that allows designated contacts request access to a vault if the account holder dies or becomes incapacitated. Stealing someone’s password manager credentials gives attackers access to every login stored inside. We recently reported on an attempt to steal 1Password credentials. Lastpass also notes that: “Several of the phishing sites are clearly intended to target passkeys, reflecting both the increased interest on the part of cybercriminals in passkeys and the increased adoption on the part of consumers.” Passkeys are a very secure replacement for passwords. They can’t be cracked, guessed or phished, and let you log in easily without having to type a password every time. Most password managers—like LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, and Bitwarden—now store and sync passkeys across devices. Because passkeys often protect high-value assets like banking, crypto wallets, password managers, and company accounts—they’ve become an attractive prize for attackers. Advice for users While passkeys themselves cannot be phished via simple credential theft, attackers can trick users into: Registering a new passkey on a malicious site or a fake login page Approving fraudulent device syncs or account transfers Disabling passkeys and reverting to weaker login methods, then stealing those fallback credentials LastPass and other security experts recommend: Never enter your master password on links received via email or text. Understand how passkeys work and keep them safe. Only logging into your password manager via official apps or bookmarks. Be wary of urgent or alarming messages demanding immediate action. Remember that legitimate companies won’t ask for sensitive credentials via email or phone. Use an up-to-date real-time anti-malware solution preferably with a web protection module. From reporting threats to removing them. Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Life, death, and online identity: What happens to your online accounts after death? The rapid technological advances of recent decades have transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. One major shift is that many of us now maintain extensive digital footprints, spanning countless online accounts, from email and social media to banking, investments, cloud storage, utility payments, and more. In life, we work hard to protect these accounts from others, particularly cybercriminals. Yet when death or incapacity strikes, ensuring that our loved ones have legal access to them becomes critically important. This emerging area of asset management remains in its early stages, facing a complex technological landscape, fragmented (or nonexistent) legal frameworks, and significant systemic gaps. To address these challenges, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) has been developing a new whitepaper and a digital estate planning guide that examine this issue on a global scale. In this Help Net Security interview, Dean H. Saxe, an OpenID Foundation member and long-time contributor to digital identity standards, discusses this initiative and what the Foundation hopes to accomplish with them. (Dean H. Saxe’s answers have been edited for length and clarity.) Why did the OpenID Foundation decide to focus on the problem of what happens to digital assets after death, and why do you think this issue has been neglected for so long? I became interested in this idea in 2010, when a close friend of mine passed away unexpectedly at a young age, leaving behind his wife and two young children. We both worked in security and his data was difficult for his family to obtain after his passing. At the time, I considered how we could implement a dead man’s switch that would activate after a specified period of account inactivity. This could be used, for example, to release account credentials to a chosen loved one. However, the penetration of credential managers was very low at the time, so the idea was put on the back burner for years. In 2022, I was in Berlin for the European Identity & Cloud (EIC) Conference. The FIDO Alliance had just announced synced passkeys, a significant development that highlighted both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge was that digital credentials, such as passkeys, would not allow an individual to write down their credentials, creating more barriers to accessing the digital estate of an individual after death. The opportunity, however, was the increased use of credential managers that would occur as passkeys became commonplace for most users. I shared my ideas with a select group of identity standards architects, including Vittorio Bertocci, a friend and mentor. They all agreed. Unfortunately, Vittorio got sick and passed away on October 7, 2023. In the following weeks I talked to members of the identity community at the Authenticate Conference and the Internet Identity Workshop. Each of these conversations helped move forward the ideas that eventually became the Death and the Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG). The group was chartered in September 2024 and began to meet regularly in November 2024. As regards to why this issue has been neglected for so long, I cannot say for sure. However, many of my friends and colleagues are uncomfortable talking about death and thinking of their own mortality. I, too, am uncomfortable with the topic! I think that’s a natural barrier that has prevented us from making headway until now. What kind of problems do businesses encounter and what kinds of risks do companies face when employees or customers pass away without a clear digital estate plan? I first encountered this problem a while back in a previous role when a customer services team member came to me with the questions: “What do we do with the account and digital assets of a customer who has passed away? How do we verify they have died?” At the time, there weren’t any runbooks for how to handle the death of a customer. Once again, because many people are uncomfortable discussing death, we had not planned for it. In my own experience working with various organizations, it’s clear that we fail to consider what to do when our customers or users pass away or become incapacitated. And until we pave a clear path for organizations to follow, it is unlikely that we’ll see broad adoption of mechanisms for managing death and the disposition of users’ digital assets. I see two clear problems for companies today: First, how do you prove that a customer has died? Second, how do you ensure that the customer’s digital assets are handled in accordance with their wishes? In the first case, proving the death of a user will depend on the jurisdiction in which they died, so unique processes will have to be created depending on the jurisdiction. This is incredibly difficult and time consuming to manage on a worldwide basis. In the second, there is no clear pathway to establish who is responsible for the decedent’s digital assets and how they wish to have them handled. (Though Kudos to Apple, Google, Facebook, and other organizations that have established mechanisms that individuals can configure to establish a mechanism for their chosen legacy managers to handle their accounts in accordance with their wishes.) But we still lack a universal set of mechanisms that operate within the context of law and culture to manage a digital estate. Should some accounts be inheritable (e.g., accounts where you pay for games, books, etc., or accounts storing digital art and other creative digital works)? That is, should the contents be inheritable? I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t feel like this is an area I can weigh in upon. However, if these assets are inheritable, there must be a pathway to enable this inheritance which may, or may not, exist today. How is AI, and especially tools that generate content or simulate people’s voices and likenesses, making this issue more complex? This seems to me a completely novel problem – who has the “rights” to this “material”, and are companies already misusing the access they have to photos, videos and audio recordings? We’re in the early days of understanding how AI impacts death. There are tools that allow individuals to create AI avatars of themselves for their friends and family to “speak” with after death. This is behavior that the individual will have consented to. On the other hand, there are AI avatars created without the knowledge or consent of the deceased. In one famous case, a murdered man’s sister created an AI deepfake of her brother which was played in court during the sentencing phase for the person who murdered him. The images were of the deceased man, but the words he “spoke” were those of his sister. Is this right? Is this wrong? I can only speak for myself to say that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable. The current draft of the paper says that “digital estate planning will not be viable at scale until the technical stack supports delegation that is verifiable, revocable, interoperable, and usable by the average person with or without legal representation. Service providers, such as social media sites, cloud services, and online crypto wallets, require digital estate services to manage their users’ legacy managers.” Can you see this happening without regulations? What’s the incentive for service providers? Today, we lack the tools (protocols) and the regulations to enable digital estate management at scale. Law and regulation can force a change in behavior by large providers. However, lacking effective protocols to establish a mechanism to identify the decedent’s chosen individuals who will manage their digital estate, every service will have to design their own path. This creates an exceptional burden on individuals planning their digital estate, and on individuals who manage the digital estates of the deceased. For example, some services require the use of impersonation – logging in as the user with their credentials – to close their digital accounts. But impersonation can be abused. There have been many instances of deceased individuals “posting” new content on social media accounts after their death. The incentive for service providers to resolve these gaps is unclear to me. While I hope that they are incentivized by being good citizens of the world, this is unlikely to create the change we need. If laws don’t catch up quickly, do you think people will start treating their digital assets like “contraband”, e.g., secretly sharing passwords or creating shadow archives to bypass companies? Sharing of credentials is already happening and, in many cases, is a recommended practice due to a lack of other mechanisms for managing digital assets. What are the most important aspects that need to be addressed correctly to achieve satisfactory digital estate “handover”? I encourage you to review the planning guide we released for public comment alongside the white paper. However, to answer the question, I encourage individuals to document their digital estate: list every online account including social media, financial, insurance, healthcare, email, cloud file storage, etc., along with the username for the account. Ideally, all this information along with the user’s credentials (e.g. passwords, passkeys, and OTPs) are stored in a suitable credential manager, such as 1Password, BitWarden, or Dashlane. The data should include specific instructions, where relevant, regarding your wishes for handling of the data after you have passed away. For example, you may wish to have your Facebook account memorialized while your blog should be maintained for five years before being shut down and removed from the internet. The data is yours – take care to be explicit how you’d like it to be handled after your death. The individual should store the necessary data to unlock the credential manager in a secure place that can be accessed after their death. Depending on their circumstances, this may mean leaving the data with their lawyer or other estate planning professional. If the data is provided to a loved one, there is a risk of abuse of the trust they have placed in this individual. Finally, work with a lawyer familiar with estate planning and digital assets to ensure that your digital estate is properly represented in your estate documents, along with your specific wishes for each account and the data contained within the account. You’ve been involved in this project for a while. Were there any comments that surprised you? And were there aspects you hadn’t considered before starting the project? Absolutely! Early in the DADE work a member of the community group expressed discomfort with the word death. In their culture, it is considered impolite to use such terms. As an American growing up culturally Jewish, my view of death and related practices were influenced by what I observed in my own life. My co-author, Mike Kiser, did a masterful job of documenting some of the different belief systems and practices around the world that impact how individuals talk about, think about, and manage death. I’m glad to have a partner like Mike to help expand our understanding of the cultural and religious practices around death and dying to inform our work. If we are to be successful in developing protocols for managing digital estates, the protocols must be flexible enough to account for the different practices and laws found around the world. I look forward to learning more as we continue this work to ensure that all humans worldwide can manage their digital estates in a way that is culturally and religiously appropriate. What do you hope this white paper and guide will change, in terms of public awareness and industry standards? When we set out to write this paper, we wanted to influence the large technology and social media platforms, politicians, regulators, estate planners, and others who can help change the status quo. Further, we hoped to influence standards development organizations, such as the OpenID Foundation and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and their members. As standards developers in the realm of identity, we have an obligation to the people we serve to consider identity from birth to death and beyond, to ensure every human receives the respect they deserve in life and in death. Additionally, we wrote the planning guide to help individuals plan for their own digital estate. By giving people the tools to help describe, document, and manage their digital estates proactively, we can raise more awareness and provide tools to help protect individuals at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. The comment period for the paper and guide ends on Friday, October 24th. Instructions for how to send in comments can be found here. Subscribe to our breaking news e-mail alert to never miss out on the latest breaches, vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. Subscribe here!

An ongoing phishing campaign is targeting LastPass and Bitwarden users with fake emails claiming that the companies were hacked, urging them to download a supposedly more secure desktop version of the password manager. The messages direct recipients to download a binary that BleepingComputer has discovered installs Syncro, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool used by managed service providers (MSP) to streamline IT operations. The threat actors are using the Syncro MSP program to deploy the ScreenConnect remote support and access software. 'Vulnerable' old .EXE installs In a threat alert this week, LastPass makes it clear that the company did not suffer any cybersecurity incident and that the messages are a social engineering effort by a threat actor. "To be clear, LastPass has NOT been hacked, and this is an attempt on the part of a malicious actor to draw attention and generate urgency in the mind of the recipient, a common tactic for social engineering and phishing emails," LastPass says. According to the company, the campaign started over the weekend, presumably to take advantage of the reduced staffing over the Columbus Day holiday weekend and delay detection. The phishing emails are well crafted and urge recipients to install a more secure desktop app that LastPass developed as an MSI replacement for the "outdated .exe format" that had weakenesses that allowed access to vault information. “Attackers exploited weaknesses in older .exe installations, which could, under certain conditions, allow unauthorized access to cached vault data,” reads the fake security alert from the threat actor. LastPass notes that the fake messages come from ‘hello@lastpasspulse[.]blog’ but BleepingComputer also saw emails delivered from ‘hello@lastpasjournal[.]blog’. Bitwarden users also targeted The phishing emails also impersonate Bitwarden and share the same writing style and lure in an attempt to create a sense of urgency and convince recipients to follow the download link to an improved deskop application. Yesterday, BleepingComputer received a notice from ‘[email protected]’ describing a similar security incident that prompted the release of a secure client app that users need to install. At the time of writing, Cloudflare is blocking access to the landing pages included in the fraudulent emails and is marking them as phishing attempts. Legitmate tools for remote access BleepingComputer retrieved the binary samples distributed in the phishing emails targeting LastPass and Bitwarden users and found that they are functionally the same. The malware installs the Syncro MSP platform agent with parameters that hide its system tray icon in an effort to keep the user unaware of the new tool. Based on our observations, Syncro's single purpose appears to be to deploy the ScreenConnect support tool as a "bring-your-own" installer, which gives the threat actor remote access to the endpoint. The Syncro agent is configured with very few options, suggesting that the threat actor limited to just the functionality they needed. The configuration files shows that the agent checks in with the server every 90 seconds. It does not have enabled the built-in remote access and doesn't deploy the remote support utilities Splashtop, which is bundled with the Syncro platform, or TeamViewer, for which an integration exists. Furthermore, the extracted configuration did not contain policies to deploy security solutions on the compromised endpoint, and disabled the Emsisoft, Webroot, and Bitdefender agents. Once ScreenConnect is installed on a device, the threat actors can remotely connect to a target's computer and deploy further malware payloads, steal data, and potentially access the password vaults of users through saved credentials. Phishing for 1Password accounts Last week, another campaign targeted 1Password users with emails falsely warning that their accounts had been compromised. The indicators for that activity, from the wording in the message and landing URL, to the sender address (watchtower@eightninety[.]com) were different. Researchers at cybersecurity company Malwarebytes say that users clicking on an embedded button were taken to a phishing page (onepass-word[.]com) via a Mandrillapp redirection. The attacks targeting 1Password were first reported by Brett Christensen (Hoax-Slayer) on September 25. Users of password management tools should ignore such alerts and always login to the provider’s official website to check for any security alerts pending review. Important security incidents like those claimed in the emails are also broadly communicated across the companies’ blogs and via press releases, so double-checking on official channels is always a good practice. It is also worth remembering that companies won't ever ask for the master password to your vaults. Update 10/16 - Syncro sent the below statement to BleepingComputer regarding the phishing campaign: "We identified the malicious accounts and have shut down the installs to ensure that no further agents can be installed. The Syncro platform itself was not compromised but rather a malicious actor posing as an MSP that created this account and then used it for nefarious purposes." - A Syncro spokesperson Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. 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Betti RHC, la prima graphic novel al mondo dedicata alla cybersecurity awareness, ha finalmente il suo sito ufficiale. Uno spazio tutto suo dove scoprire il progetto, sfogliare le copertine degli episodi e immergersi nel mondo di Betti: la giovane laureanda in informatica che, dopo la morte misteriosa del padre, si trasforma nell'hacker più potente del mondo. Una storia avvincente che, episodio dopo episodio, affronta una minaccia digitale diversa — dal phishing al ransomware, fino al cyberbullismo — e insegna a riconoscerla e a difendersi, senza che sembri mai una lezione. Sul sito trovate tutto ciò che rende Betti un progetto diverso dal solito: la sua filosofia, le anteprime delle tavole e il racconto di come nasce ogni volume. Perché dietro Betti RHC c'è solo lavoro umano: ogni tavola è disegnata interamente a mano dagli artisti del Gruppo Arte di Red Hot Cyber, senza alcun uso di intelligenza artificiale. E a garantire che ogni storia sia realistica e tecnicamente corretta c'è la supervisione degli hacker etici del gruppo HackerHood, che mantengono il racconto fedele al mondo reale della sicurezza informatica. C'è spazio anche per le aziende, che possono usare Betti come strumento di awareness diverso dai soliti corsi: acquistare i volumi, personalizzarli con il proprio brand o sponsorizzare nuovi episodi. E come primo regalo, l'episodio "Byte the Silence", dedicato al cyberbullismo, è scaricabile gratuitamente per uso personale. Perché la miglior difesa, in fondo, è una bella storia. 👉 Scopri tutto su https://betti.redhotcyber.com/

Proton fixed a bug in its new Authenticator app for iOS that logged users' sensitive TOTP secrets in plaintext, potentially exposing multi-factor authentication codes if the logs were shared. Last week, Proton released a new Proton Authenticator app, which is a free standalone two-factor authentication (2FA) application for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The app is used to store multi-factor authentication TOTP secrets that can be used to generate one-time passcodes for authentication on websites and applications. Over the weekend, a user posted in a now-deleted Reddit post that the iOS version was exposing TOTP secrets in the app's debug logs found under Settings > Logs. "Imported my 2FA accounts, enabled backup and sync, everything looked good at first. At some point, after I changed the label on one of my entries and switched apps briefly," reads an archive of the post. "I came back to find that about half of my 2FA entries were gone. I think it might've happened after the label edit, but I'm not 100% sure. Could've been something else. Either way, they disappeared without any error or warning." "I wanted to do the right thing and submit a bug report. While preparing it, I opened the log file the app generates, and that's when it went from mildly annoying to deeply concerning. Turns out, the log contains full TOTP secrets in plaintext. Yes, including the one for my Bitwarden account." Another commenter noted that the leak stems from code on the iOS app [1, 2] that adds a lot of data about a TOTP entry to a params variable, which is then passed to two functions used for adding or updating a TOTP secret on the app. When this is done, the functions will also add this data to a log entry, which exposes the TOTP secret. Proton confirmed the bug in the iOS version, stating that it is now fixed in version 1.1.1, released to the App Store approximately 7 hours ago. "Secrets are never transmitted to the server in plaintext, and all sync of secrets is done with end-to-end encryption. Logs are local only (never sent to the server), and these secrets can also be exported on your device to meet GDPR data portability requirements," Proton told BleepingComputer. "In other words, even if this was not in the logs, somebody who has access to your device to get these logs, would still be able to obtain the secrets. Proton's encryption cannot protect against device side compromise, so you must always secure your device as that is outside of our threat model." "We have updated the iOS app to change the logging behavior, but this isn't a vulnerability that can be exploited by an attacker, and if the attacker has access to your device to access the local logs, they will anyways be able to obtain the secrets, and there is nothing Proton (or any 2FA app) can do to prevent that." While this log data can't be exploited remotely, the concern was that if the logs were shared or posted anywhere to help diagnose an issue or bug, it would also expose the sensitive TOTP secret to a third party. These secrets could then be imported to another Authenticator to generate one-time passcodes for that account. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report