Microsoft, the world largest software maker is now banning all weak passwords across its services.
According to Telegraph, the move came from Microsoft after LinkedIn hack that occurred last week, when 117 million user credentials were leaked.
“A hacker was selling a list with 117M usernames and passwords purportedly leaked from LinkedIn. With these kinds of leaks happening almost weekly now, what can a person do to protect themselves? Or if you are an IT admin, what can you do to protect your users accounts?” these were the questions put forward by Alex Weinert from Microsoft's Identity Protection Team.
Therefore, the answer was banning all the simple looking, easily hack-able passwords. Microsoft see’s more than 10 million accounts attacked daily, as per latest Microsoft Security Incident Report.
"We analyse the passwords that are being used most commonly. Bad guys use this data to inform their attacks," Alex wrote. "What *we* do with the data is prevent you from having a password anywhere near the current attack list, so those attacks won’t work."
This list will be used to determine how weak, common or complex a user's password and allow the firm to notify them if it needs to be changed, as per Daily Mail.
The tech giant’s is also set to introduce a ‘smart password lockout’ system. “Our systems are designed for determining the risk associated with a specific login session. Using this, we can apply lockout semantics only to the folks who aren’t you,” said Weinert.
“The only way *you* get locked out is if someone is guessing your passwords on your own machine or network,” he added.
In today’s day and age some of the most popular and simpler means to access someone's online account is to guess a password, using hacking software which tends to try the most common ones first.
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