Windows 11 will soon release a function that attacks, from the root, one of the worst and most common habits of many users. Of so many that, in fact, if we remember it is possible that we all have done it at some time, either recently or years ago. Personally, it does not hurt me to admit that I am on that list, although it is true that in my case that has been a long time ago, but I know people who, today, keep it among their usual practices.
I mean, maybe you already figured it out, save passwords (one, several or all) in a plain text document, unencrypted. Whether it’s a document from your word processor named “Notes for my first novel.docx”, or a note created with Notepad named “passwords.txt”, this common bad habit ensures that anyone who has access to to our PC, either physically or remotely, will have access to all those services whose security we have compromised with that document. And this is what Windows 11 intends to warn about.
Thus, as we can read in WindowsLatest, from the hand of Windows 11 22H2, the already announced Sun Valley update, SmartScreen will add a new security function, whose function will be alert the user when typing a password in an insecure environment. This feature will look at applications such as Notepad, as well as programs it identifies as malicious, and in all such cases it will display a pop-up alerting the user to the security risks of what they are doing, so that they have a chance to to turn back before it’s too late.
This new feature, which Microsoft says acts at kernel levelhe is able to detect the introduction of passwords in any system application, so we can say that its scope, within Windows 11, will be universal. Its main objective, as you can deduce from its function, is to prevent phishing, preventing users from entering their passwords by mistake on websites that pretend to be legitimate, something that affects everything from social networks to online banking services. However, thanks to its ability to detect the use of passwords in any environment, it also extends to other insecure actions.
Passwords are still, today, one of the weakest points of security. And it is that, despite the existence of applications and services to manage them, like these six for Android that we recently recommended, there are many users who continue to do without this possibility and, instead, use insecure passwords, repeat the same credentials in multiple services and manage them by saving them in Notepad. If this new feature in Windows 11 serves to improve that, it will no doubt already be a big win for Microsoft.
