Microsoft is ending support for basic authentication in Office 365 as of Oct. 1, 2022. Uhm, that's a week from the time of writing. That sounds scary, but Microsoft has been discontinuing basic authentication for new customers for quite some time, so chances are it's already disabled for your organization. In many organizations where there has been a printer/scanner/MFP for a long time, we encounter this or with very old software packages that need to be able to send emails. The consequence after Oct. 1 is that this will no longer function.
Why is Microsoft turning off basic authentication? To improve Office 365 security. Basic authentication is a common attack vector and relatively easy to abuse. Modern Authentication is much harder to abuse, and also provides additional services such as multi-factor authentication.
Important to know: Microsoft disables basic authentication for all protocols used in Exchange Online. The protocols themselves are NOT disabled and continue to work as usual, it's just the authentication method!
Microsoft is taking an aggressive approach to disabling basic authentication. The original plan was to start on Oct. 1 and take three months to turn it off for everyone. Microsoft has changed their plan, basic authentication for all tenants in Office 365 will be turned off in just one month!
As you can see, Analyst ICT is aware of these developments and we will help our customers in case this has not happened yet, in case you ended up on this page via Google? Below is how you can quickly find the settings yourself.
How do you verify that modern authentication is enabled in your Office 365 tenant?
In the Microsoft Online Portal (https://admin.microsoft.com), choose Settings | Org Settings | Modern Authentication. Top box with “Enable modern authentication for Outlook 2013 for Windows and later (recommended).”.
To check if there are clients in your organization using basic authentication, go to the Microsoft Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com) and select the Azure AD tile. You can also navigate directly to the Azure AD portal at https://aad.portal.azure.com and scroll down to Sign-in logs under Monitoring.
