In a press release, Vole said: “The password era is ending and bad actors know it, which is why they’re desperately accelerating password-related attacks while they still can.”

The company now “blocks 7,000 attacks on passwords per second… almost double from a year ago.” It has also seen adversary-in-the-middle phishing attacks increase by 146 per cent year over year.”

All of which is bad news. But there’s good news to come, it says, “we’ve never had a better solution to these pervasive attacks: passkeys.”

In a blogpost, Vole sets out the ways in which it plans to “convince a billion users to love passkeys,” through insightful design.

 “Passkeys not only offer an improved user experience by letting you sign in faster with your face, fingerprint, or PIN, but they also aren’t susceptible to the same kinds of attacks as passwords. Plus, passkeys eliminate forgotten passwords and one-time codes.”

Passkeys have been accelerating in adoption this year. “In the two years since passkeys were announced and made available for consumer use, the FIDO Alliance reported a few weeks ago, “passkey awareness has risen by 50 per cent, from 39 per cent familiar in 2022 to 57 per cent in 2024.”

“The majority of those familiar with passkeys are enabling the technology to sign in… Meanwhile, despite passwords remaining the most common way for account sign-in, usage overall has declined as alternatives rise in availability.”