All change for Microsoft. The company has suddenly confirmed a major update “for over 1 billion end users,” as the deletion of passwords for all users becomes real. Your Microsoft password, it warns, “could be easily forgotten or guessed by an attacker,” and it’s now time “to completely remove the password from your account.”
“The password era is ending,” Microsoft warned in December. “Bad actors know it, which is why they’re desperately accelerating password-related attacks while they still can.” With “7,000 attacks on passwords [blocked] per second… almost double from a year ago,” the company is on a mission to “convince a billion users to love passkeys.”
A passkey replaces password and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes with account authentication linked to your hardware devices or devices and secured by the same security that unlocks that device, most likely your fingerprint or your face. Unlike passwords, this means a passkey cannot leak or be stolen as it requires that physical hardware device. And unlike 2FA, it cannot be intercepted or bypassed.
