Microsoft says cu l8r to text message security
Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of SMS as a method of authentication for personal accounts. The company cites vulnerabilities such as phishing and SIM-swap attacks as reasons for this change. Instead, Microsoft will promote passwordless accounts and passkeys as the future of secure authentication.
- ▪Microsoft confirmed that SMS authentication is being phased out due to security concerns.
- ▪The company has been advocating for passwordless accounts and passkeys for over a year.
- ▪The UK's National Cyber Security Centre endorsed passkeys as a standard in April 2026.
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Record
| Original publisher | www.theregister.com - Articles |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/05/20/microsoft-says-cu-l8r-to-text-message-security/5243304 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 14:33:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T13:28:50.685Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T13:57:17.762Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | m3EbVsF3ABHG |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); On-Prem Microsoft says cu l8r to text message security Old, busted, insecure authentication to be replaced with something shinier and safer Richard Speed Richard Speed Published wed 20 May 2026 // 13:33 UTC Microsoft has confirmed that SMS is on the way out as a method of authentication and recovery for personal Microsoft accounts.Fraud and dubious security were cited as reasons for the move: "SMS authentication is vulnerable to phishing and SIM-swap attacks." Passwordless accounts,…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at www.theregister.com - Articles.
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