Security Defaults settings email

Question

I received this email from Microsoft Security

The security defaults setting for your sustainablearizona.org tenant will be turned on by January 2, 2025

I have no idea what this means. It talks about my "tenants." I didn't know I had tenants. It's a completely confusing email with no instructions for a human being. Of course, Microsoft makes it impossible to get help from anyone about this or any other issue.

Answer 1

Hello,

 

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

Security defaults is security measures that Microsoft is enabling by default to enhance security which includes multifactor authentication (MFA) when logging in.

According to the mail, security defaults will be enabled since 2nd, Jan, 2025.

If you would like to disable it, please kindly refer to below Microsoft Official Documentation:

REF: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/fundamentals/security-defaults#disabling-security-defaults

 

I hope the information above is helpful.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

 

Best regards，

Jill Zhou

 

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Answer 2

@John Neville

Thank you for posting this in Microsoft Q&A.

As I understand you are got an email regarding security defaults getting enabled from January 2, 2025.

As part of the Secure Future Initiative, we’ve evolved our security approach to align with three security principles: secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations. Secure by default means security protections are enabled and enforced by default. In Microsoft Entra, security defaults are an example demonstrating our secure by default approach. Security defaults are enabled for every new tenant. This provides a baseline level of protection for your Entra identities and resources. To make sure that organizations relying on security defaults are well protected, we’re updating a requirement for authentication method registration to help improve your security posture.

 

We’re removing the option to skip multifactor authentication (MFA) registration for 14 days when security defaults are enabled. This means all users will be required to register for MFA on their first login after security defaults are turned on. This will help reduce the risk of account compromise during the 14-day window, as MFA can block over 99.2% of identity-based attacks. This change affects newly created tenants starting on December 2nd, 2024 and will be rolled out to existing tenants starting in January 2025.

 

This update is part of our ongoing effort to provide you with a secure and reliable identity service. We recommend that you enable security defaults for your organization if you are not using Conditional Access, as security defaults offer a simple and effective way to protect your users and resources from common threats. 

There was a public announcement regarding this in tech community article.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/identity/update-to-security-defaults/4044868

Let me know if you have any further questions on this.

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