According to a survey by Sapio Research on behalf of the FIDO Alliance, 95% of 700 IT and security decision-makers in the US, UK, France and Germany said frontline workers in healthcare and manufacturing had used workarounds such as staying signed in, sharing credentials, or bypassing multifactor authentication in the past 12 months. These habits break the link between an account and the person using it, leaving shared workstations and passed-around passwords open to misuse.
Attackers appear to be probing the same weak point. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported a confirmed or suspected attempt to abuse account recovery, password reset, or unlock in the past year, with 28% confirming a specific incident. Sixty percent said their service desk faced a confirmed or suspected social-engineering attempt. Identity checks at recovery vary widely—badges, email, SMS, biometrics, manager approval—and none is used by a majority, giving attackers multiple channels to target. The same share of respondents, 48%, said they are very or extremely concerned about AI-enabled impersonation as about conventional social engineering.
Authentication problems are common: respondents estimated that 37% of frontline workers hit an issue in a typical month, losing about 2.5 hours each. Logging in with gloves or protective equipment and delays switching between devices were the top cited challenges. Passkeys are in use at 28% of organizations, but 45% of those still keep a password alongside them, and organizations running a mix of password and passwordless methods reported credential sharing at twice the rate of passwordless-leading organizations. The FIDO Alliance's executive director and CEO, Andrew Shikiar, said the research shows frontline organizations don't have to trade speed for security, pointing to productivity gains from phishing-resistant passkeys.