Microsoft: This Azure password-banning tool will help kill off bad P@$$w0rd habits

▤ Summary

Microsoft has released the public preview of a new Azure Active Directory tool that will help admins kill off bad passwords in the enterprise.Password spraying is designed to get around rate limiting, where a system caps the number of attempts to log in to a single account before locking it down.The US Compute Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, posted an alert in March about password spraying attacks, confirming this was the technique used by the nine Iranian nationals who the DOJ indicted for allegedly hacking 8,000 professor email accounts at 144 US universities, as well as accounts at the US Department of Labor, the United Nations, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.Shortly before the indictments were announced, Microsoft also posted a warning about password spray attacks and provided Azure AD customers with information about tools to mitigate them."Todays public preview gives you the ability to do this in the cloud and on premises -- wherever your users change their passwords -- and unprecedented configurability," writes Alex Simons, director of program management at Microsofts Identity Division.

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