{"id":10048,"date":"2025-03-28T09:01:31","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T13:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=10048"},"modified":"2025-03-28T09:01:31","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T13:01:31","slug":"microsoft-warns-1-billion-windows-users-do-not-use-password","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/?p=10048","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Warns 1 Billion Windows Users\u2014Do Not Use Password"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n

This headline on Forbes is not quite as strange as it looks at first. The article<\/a> is about how Microsoft is trying to move that huge number of users from passwords to passkeys for their Microsoft accounts — not their PCs. According to the article, this is a security move prompted by the, \u201c7,000 attacks on passwords [blocked] per second\u2026 almost double from a year ago,\u201d against their account infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s a huge volume of attacks. If you do the math, that’s over 220 billion<\/em> attempts per year to crack into user accounts at Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you think that leaves little, insignificant users like you and I unaffected because the crackers are spending all their time on the big targets? You’d be wrong. I experience hundreds of attempts to crack my firewall passwords every day. Not the same volume, but not insignificant, either. And it’s not because I run a popular web site either. Crackers do concentrate on the juicy targets, but they also search out the small, probably less well protected targets as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what we all are, you know. We’re targets to the crackers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Microsoft is doing is a really good thing. I’m not in the habit of praising M$, but you probably already know that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that M$ is doing it so late in the game. How many of those billion accounts are already cracked and being exploited?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technology they’re using is Public\/Private KeyPairs<\/a>, PPKP to use the acronym. Technology that I and millions of Linux and Unix users have been taking advantage of for decades. No — that’s not all Linux users, but it’s mostly those of us who run websites or other servers and need to login remotely to perform maintenance and monitoring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m going to go with Microsoft’s recommendation on this one. Switch over to use what they call “passkeys” as soon as possible. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don’t wait! Do it NOW! <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This headline on Forbes is not quite as strange as it looks at first. The article is about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[75,739],"tags":[742,740,741],"class_list":["post-10048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","category-windows","tag-passkeys","tag-ppkp","tag-public-private-keypairs"],"modified_by":"David Both","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10048"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10052,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10048\/revisions\/10052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.both.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}