Identity

🟢 Low | Source: AWS What’s New Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication, allowing user pool data — including credentials, configurations, and federation settings — to be synchronised to a standby Region in near real-time. This improves authentication resilience by enabling traffic failover during a regional outage without forcing users to re-authenticate. The feature is available as a paid add-on across most major AWS Regions. Architect’s Take: Review your existing Cognito-based authentication architectures for single-Region dependencies and assess whether the Essentials or Plus tier add-on cost is justified by your RTO/RPO requirements. Ensure your incident response runbooks are updated to include Cognito traffic redirection procedures, and validate that federated identity providers (SAML/OIDC) are accessible from the secondary Region before declaring it ready for failover. ...

🟠 High | Source: Schneier on Security Attackers are exploiting Meta’s AI support chatbot to hijack Instagram accounts by social-engineering the bot into adding a hacker-controlled email address and triggering a password reset. The attack requires no technical vulnerability in the traditional sense — the AI simply complies with the request after a verification code exchange. This highlights a significant trust and authorisation flaw in how Meta’s AI assistant handles account management actions on behalf of unauthenticated parties. ...

🟠 High | Source: The Register — Security Passwords were found stored in plaintext within Active Directory user and computer description fields, making them trivially accessible to any authenticated user on the network. Because AD description fields are readable by all domain users by default, a low-privilege attacker or compromised account could harvest credentials at scale with a simple LDAP query. This represents a significant credential exposure risk in any hybrid or cloud-connected environment where AD is the identity backbone. ...