Using the Internet or accessing any network service, there can be a lot of threats from hackers for the illegal access to users' account. If a system has very sensitive data but is not offering a secure login protocol, then the whole security is at risk and could easily be compromised. Due to the rapid increase in the usage of digital equipment and online banking transactions, there is mandatory need of secure login. In this paper, our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we provide a brief and comprehensive overview of the modern attacks in different computing environments. We group existing approaches and critically evaluate the modern attacks in terms of severity of attacks. Secondly, we investigate the performance of different login protocols that can achieve better security. A performance comparison of these secure login protocols also form part of this paper. Moreover, our research is focused on the most recent attacks and their solutions that have been published over the year 2010–2016. The findings in this paper can be used by security experts, analysts and security policy designers to select appropriate authentication architecture for relevant computing environment.