Why you need to stop using passwords and switch to this secure alternative now

If you’ve been hearing a lot more about passkeys recently, there’s good reason for it. After becoming more widely available in 2022, passkeys have surged in popularity, driven by ease of use and increased security over the traditional password. The FIDO Alliance, the consortium that drove the development and adoption of passkeys, noted in a 2026 survey that some five billion of them are now in use globally and about 90 percent of people are aware of them. The first Thursday in May, which was once known as World Password Day, has even rebranded to World Passkey Day. The surge in passkey adoption comes even as phishing and sophisticated AI-powered hacks have made protecting yourself online more important than ever. Experts say that switching from passwords to passkeys whenever possible is one way to reduce the risk of remote phishing attacks that target employee login credentials. “The passkey is a key element—not a magic solution—to eliminating that risk,” says Eric Sachs, corporate vice president of identity and network access at Microsoft. “You’ll still have other cybersecurity problems now with AI, but if you can get rid of the number one risk, you can turn your attention somewhere else.” What are passkeys, anyway? Much like a password, passkeys are a mechanism for logging into a website. But rather than a series of numbers, letters, and symbols created by a person or a password manager to access any number of sites, they are random bytes of data and access only one specific website. They consist of two parts. This first is a verification from a device (or password manager) that the person attempting to log in is exactly who they say they are. The second is the transmission of the actual passkey to a specific website. Gary Orenstein, chief customer officer at password manager Bitwarden, describes the process as a “dedicated handshake between the provider and the user.” “Part of the passkey protocol is to authenticate that it is you accessing the passkey,” Orenstei