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Re-enable Basic Authentication in Office 365 - Exchange Online
How to use the Microsoft self-service diagnostic tool to re-enable Basic Authentication in Exchange Online
Disabling basic authentication in Exchange Online
Microsoft have been advising customers for some time that they will be disabling basic authentication in Exchange Online to improve security.
Applications that use legacy authentication do not support multifactor factor authentication and are vulnerable to password spray attacks.
What you need to know about basic authentication deprecation
- Microsoft will start to disable basic authentication in randomly selected Office 365 tenants from 1st Oct 2022
- Basic authentication access will be disabled for these protocols:
MAPI, RPC, Offline Address Book (OAB), Exchange Web Services (EWS), POP, IMAP, Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), and Remote PowerShell - SMTP AUTH will not be disabled
Microsoft will post a message to the Message Center 7 days before the change, and they will post a Service Health Dashboard notification to your tenant on the day of the change.
How can I re-enable basic authentication in Office 365?
If you have not yet migrated to using Microsoft Graph. Microsoft have a self-service diagnostic tool that you can use to re-enable basic auth for the protocols that are still using it.
You can only re-enable basic auth once until the end of Dec 2022. After that, Microsoft will permanently disable basic auth.
Using the self-service diagnostic tool to re-enable basic auth
Sign into the Office 365 admin portal
https://admin.microsoft.com
Help & support
Enter "Diag: Enable Basic Auth in EXO" and click Run Tests
Select the protocol you want to re-enable
e.g. Exchange Web Services (EWS)
Tick to acknowledge the settings change and click update
Basic auth has been re-enabled for the selected protocol
Reference:
by Author
Basic Authentication Deprecation in Exchange Online – September 2022 Update
Conditional Access Policy - Block Legacy Authentication - TechLabs
Legacy protocols like POP, SMTP and IMAP don't support MFA and can be used to password spray attack your Office 365 mailboxes. You can disable legacy authentication and improve your Office 365 security using this Azure Conditional Access policy.
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