Have you noticed it, too? Your smartphone or tablet keeps asking for your email password? Your scanner no longer does what it's supposed to do? What is going on anyway? Microsoft has begun turning on Security Defaults in phases in Microsoft 365 environments where this security is not yet active. Security Defaults are default security settings, such as activating Multifactor Authentication (MFA). Do you have a Microsoft 365 environment and no MFA set up yet? If so, you will soon receive a request from Microsoft to turn on MFA. Read more in this article about what else is changing.

Microsoft has decided to raise the overall security level. They are doing this by implementing stricter security settings across all Microsoft 365 environments.

Did you know that MFA is one of the most important security settings? 99.9% of the hacked accounts did not have MFA set up. Whereas before you had the choice to set up MFA for you and your colleagues, soon it will become a requirement from Microsoft.

What exactly is going to change after turning on Security Defaults?

• MFA turns on for all Microsoft 365 users
• Accounts with elevated privileges must use MFA for login more often
• Legacy Authentication is turned off, about the latter we previously wrote a blog

Legacy Authentication, also known as Basic Authentication called, is a outdated and old Microsoft login protocol that sends your password over the Internet every time you do something in Microsoft 365. The protocol does not support MFA. The new version is Modern Authentication, which no longer sends passwords over the Internet. Turning on Security Defaults will also turn off Legacy Authentication.

For some companies, this change may have an impact. Perhaps you or your colleagues are using Apple's own mail application to read Microsoft 365 e-mail, or a device in your organization, such as a printer, still connects to e-mail using an old protocol (POP3/IMAP). To continue using apple mail, you'll need to discard your account and add it again. And the printer will need to be set up differently.

Additional note: In your organization used (cloud) software packages that use O365 e-mail accounts to send/receive messages (orders, invoices, etc) also suffer from this.

Right now we still get a lot of questions about this, hopefully this short blog article will help you with why this problem is happening. And what you can do about it. If you are still experiencing problems, we help you like! #superlogical