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(CNN Business) -
Microsoft has a solution to the notorious problem of having to remember too many passwords: delete them entirely.
The company announced Wednesday that in the coming weeks it will introduce a "password-free account" option for all users of several popular services such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft OneDrive.
Microsoft already made this option available to corporate accounts in March.
"You can now completely remove the password from your Microsoft account," wrote Vasu Jakkal, the company's corporate vice president of Security, Compliance and Identity, in a blog post Wednesday.
Instead of passwords, Microsoft (MSFT) will allow users to sign in to these services with the company's Authenticator app, which produces a unique, numbered sign-in code every few seconds, or with Windows Hello, which allows users to Users log in using facial recognition, a fingerprint or a unique pin.
Microsoft users can also purchase an external security key, such as a USB drive with login information stored on it, or register a phone number to which Microsoft sends a verification code.
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Microsoft's change comes after the increase in cyberattacks in the last year.
With the majority of company employees working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic,
hackers
have many more avenues to infiltrate a company's systems, compromising passwords in one of their most common strategies.
(Microsoft has had its share of security issues in recent months, too, with its services tied to multiple
hacks
and high-profile breaches.)
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Passwords often end up for sale on the dark web, where they are bought and used to hack even more services.
Hackers have even gone after password managers who claim to make login details more secure, with the popular LastPass service being
hacked
in 2015.
Billions of attacks per year
According to Microsoft, 579 password attacks occur every second, which amounts to 18 billion attacks per year.
And cybersecurity experts have said that the weakest link is human behavior: our tendency to reuse the same password across all accounts to make it easy to remember, or to create patterns for different passwords that are easy for
hackers
to guess
.
"Weak passwords are the entry point for most attacks on business and consumer accounts," says Jakkal.
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Microsoft seems to lead by example in its effort to pioneer a password-free future.
According to Jakkal, almost all of the company's employees now connect to their corporate accounts without passwords.
Other companies, like Google and Apple, also offer alternatives to passwords - sending a notification to another device to verify identity, for example - but those solutions have not yet completely replaced the need to type a password.
passwords