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Whilst millions of Gmail passwords have not suddenly leaked, despite multiple reports, Google warns compromised security credentials are giving hackers access to accounts. Its advice is clear — if you have not done so already, make this account change now.

For the second time in just a few weeks, Google hit back as reports (1,2) suggested a massive new password leak. “Reports of a ‘Gmail security breach impacting millions of users’ are false. Gmail’s defenses are strong, and users remain protected.”

But just because the breach is not new does not mean it’s not dangerous. Google says users should “reset passwords when they are found in large batches like this.” In reality, don’t wait for a breach to turn up, while regularly changing passwords is no longer considered best practice, ensuring passwords are strong and unique certainly is.

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But passwords will always be vulnerable to being leaked or stolen. “Attackers are intensifying their phishing and credential theft methods, which drive 37% of successful intrusions,” Google warns, and “an exponential rise in cookie and authentication token theft as a preferred method for attackers, with an 84% increase in infostealers.”

That’s why Google tells users that “adopting passkeys as a stronger and safer alternative to passwords” stops account password compromises.

And on that note, with these latest “Gmail security breach” headlines still swirling, there was some quieter, better news for Google and its billions of Gmail account holders.

“Google commands half of all passkey authentication activity,” Dashlane confirmed in its latest passkey adoption report. “A scale so dominant that including it in our top 20 would distort the competitive landscape for other services.” According to the password manager, “Google’s sheer volume dwarfs that of other platforms.”

This, it says, was driven “by a pivotal product decision: In October 2023, Google made passkeys the default login option for personal Google Accounts. This move effectively exposed hundreds of millions of users to passwordless authentication, creating the largest real-world deployment of passkeys to date.”

The result: “Google passkey authentications exploded by 352% over the past year.”

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Unlike Microsoft, Google is not yet advocating for the complete deletion of passwords. But it does say that defaulting to passkeys means users can create complex passwords and multi-factor authentication options that don’t need to be as convenient as SMS.

As such, while adopting passkeys is the solution, it only works if you stop using your password — even if a password remains on the account (with MFA) as a back-up.

“Google’s approach demonstrates the power of defaults,” Dashlane says. “By making passkeys the path of least resistance rather than an opt-in security feature, Google transformed passkey adoption from a trickle into a flood.”

A decade-old vulnerability in the Linux kernel has reemerged as a powerful weapon for ransomware groups, according to warnings issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Tracked as CVE 2024 1086, the flaw resides in the netfilter nf_tables component and enables local privilege escalation (LPE), allowing attackers with initial access to elevate their permissions to root and take full control of a system.

Originally introduced in the kernel’s codebase in 2014, the bug affects Linux versions from 3.15 through 6.8 rc1, impacting major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Red Hat. The vulnerability stems from a use after free (UAF) condition in the nft_verdict_init() and nf_hook_slow() functions, which improperly handle packet filtering verdicts. This flaw can lead to double free memory corruption, providing attackers a pathway to execute arbitrary code in the kernel space and gain persistent access.

Although a patch was released in January 2024 and the issue was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog by May 2024, researchers now confirm that it is being actively weaponized in ransomware campaigns. Security firm CrowdStrike first detected exploitation attempts in April 2024, later escalating the risk rating to “Critical” after public exploit code surfaced online.

Privilege escalation flaws such as CVE 2024 1086 are particularly valuable to ransomware operators. By obtaining root privileges, attackers can disable endpoint protections, encrypt files, delete backups, and move laterally across networks. Even a low privileged user account can become a launchpad for full system compromise, making this bug a prime catalyst for large scale ransomware incidents.

Organizations that rely on Linux for cloud workloads, enterprise servers, or operational technology should treat this vulnerability as actively exploited in the wild and assume exposure until verified otherwise. Especially at a time when security breaches of cloud systems are at their highest.