What’s worse than MFA fatigue? How about not knowing where these prompts are coming from? That is all about to change with these 2 new features in preview for Azure AD MFA with Microsoft Authenticator.
Many times, end-users are unaware of the source of MFA prompts and are trained to just click Approve. For security administrators, this behavior is scary and dangerous to your IT environment. Microsoft has 2 new features in public preview for Azure AD MFA that will help users make better decisions.
The first feature is Number Matching. This feature will present the user with a prompt for a number that is being displayed on the authentication screen that is requiring MFA.
This means if a bad actor is attempting to compromise a user account, the employee won’t know the number that they need to enter to satisfy the prompt requirements.
Number matching can be enabled for all users or individual groups. This feature also supports ADFS and NPS with upgrades to the latest versions. This feature also provides updates to the SSPR experience.
Number matching is a key security upgrade to traditional second-factor notifications in the Authenticator app that will be enabled by default for all tenants a few months after general availability (GA).
We highly recommend enabling number matching in the near term for improved sign-in security.
The Additional Context feature helps end-users identify if they caused the prompt or not and what is causing the prompt. When a user receives a passwordless phone sign-in or MFA push notification in Microsoft Authenticator, they’ll see the name of the application that requests the approval and the location based on the IP address where the sign-in originated from.
Combined with Number Matching, this is an important improvement in your security posture that will reduce false approvals.
Compromised passwords are one of the most common ways that bad actors can get at your data, your identity, or your money. Using multifactor authentication is one of the easiest ways to make it a lot harder for them.
If you aren’t currently using MFA for all of your users, Tridius can help walk you through the options and get this important security measure implemented in your environment. Don’t wait until it is too late!
Tridius Technologies (a Terralogic Company) is an IT consulting firm that blends strategic planning with technology innovation, in areas like Cloud Infrastructure, Application Development,
Managed Services and Dynamics 365. Our mission is to inspire, innovate and improve.
