Microsoft finally realizes password expiration is not a great security feature -

Thinking about a secure password is a hard task in its own right but with a user to come up with another one after every 60 days makes it much harder. Plus there is a chance to get even weaker security password next time. As it happens to be, Microsoft has also realized the problem in this security feature and thus have decided to remove the default password entry from the Windows 10 as a part of their security baseline.

When a business or an origination deploys their pack of Windows 10 to their several hundreds of thousands of employees, they have to check the default security box. For this reason, Microsoft has provided the customers with the Windows Security Baselines.

These baselines are consistent with the group of Microsoft recommended configuration settings which allow the user to have a more secure operating system.

One part of this security baseline is the 60 days password expiration date, which makes every user to change their security password after a few months. Now Microsoft has released an announcement that this expiration password date is actually detrimental to the security and they are removing this feature form their baseline.

To explain this action of dropping 60-day password expiration date policy, they released a statement as follows,

“When humans are forced to change their passwords, too often they’ll make a small and predictable alteration to their existing passwords, and/or forget their new passwords … Periodic password expiration is a defense only against the probability that a password (or hash) will be stolen during its validity interval and will be used by an unauthorized entity. If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it.”

One other point Microsoft illustrated to removing this feature is that once a password is hacked, the hacker has nearly 60 days to infiltrate a user’s account and in that time period, he can do a lot of damage to either an individual user or the whole organization.