SlowMist warns the FomoPeek malware hides an iOS kernel exploit that steals crypto private keys and seed phrases. Update iOS and move funds now.
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The post FomoPeek App Hides an iOS Kernel Exploit to Steal Crypto appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.
Passkeys were supposed to make stolen passwords a thing of the past. No password to phish, no secret to reuse, and no string of characters sitting in a database waiting to be leaked.
Over time, it’s thought that passkeys will replace passwords entirely. But what happens when malware steals the master key?
Researchers have found a way for malware to hijack passkey-protected accounts through Google Password Manager, highlighting an important exception: passkeys can be very secure but the software surrounding them still has weaknesses.
Passkeys are a password replacement based on public‑key cryptography. Instead of a secret you remember and type, each account gets a key pair where the private key never leaves your devices, and the website only ever sees the public key and signed challenges. Because there’s nothing reusable to phish or reuse on another site, passkeys are marketed as “phishing‑resistant” and safer than passwords stored in a browser or password manager.
By the end of 2024 Google reportedly said that 800 million Google accounts used passkeys.
Passkeys have a major advantage over passwords: there is nothing useful for a phishing site to steal. A passkey is also tied to the website it was created for, making it much harder to trick into authenticating to the wrong domain.
The other significant difference is that if malware steals a password vault, an attacker still often needs to get past a second factor on another device, such as an authenticator app on your phone, before they fully own the account. With passkeys, many services relying on them simply trust the passkey assertion, and in some cases even trust a single “user verified” flag without confirming whether a real biometric or PIN event occurred.
The researchers, however, started with a malware infected Windows computer and came up with three possible attack scenarios to steal Google synchronized passkeys. Google Password Manager can synchronize passkeys between devices, which is convenient since you don’t want to register a new passkey every time you buy a new computer. But it also opens them up to abuse.
From bad to worse the attacks are:
The researchers urge services to stop blindly trusting the user verification flag and to properly validate that a real User Verified event occurred before granting access. Google, in turn, is encouraged to harden device registration and recovery, and verify that new devices and keys are backed by genuine hardware rather than accepting them at face value.
For end users, passkeys still offer strong protection against classic phishing websites and credential stuffing attacks based on reused passwords. The weak point highlighted here is not so much the concept of passkeys, but the way they’re implemented, synchronized, and trusted without enough verification on the server side.
Until vendors close these gaps, basic anti‑malware hygiene remains critical. The best ways to prevent malware from using your passkeys are:
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
Explore how passkey implementation gaps undermine security when relying parties fail to validate the User Verified flag, reducing MFA to a single factor.
The post Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication appeared first on Unit 42.
Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.
The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this month’s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.
“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said. “Pandora’s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday.”
June’s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAI’s Codex.
Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed “GreenPlasma,” leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.
Nightmare Eclipse also last month released “YellowKey,” an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.
Microsoft received heavy blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that “Microsoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”
Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Wesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.
Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a “bone shattering” drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next month’s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.
While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barnett.
“So far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,” Barnett wrote. “As usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.”
Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.
Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the company’s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.
Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).
As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this month’s patches.
Further reading:
Microsoft’s Security Update Guide
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