As reported last week by our friends at LiveSide and discussed on the Observed Tech PODCAST Episode 86, Microsoft is now confirming their plans to roll this security option to over 700 million Microsoft Account users worldwide.
That roll out will happen over the next couple of days according to Eric Doerr the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Accounts.
Given this critical role for Microsoft account, we remain vigilant in working hard to protect your account, which is why we’re adding an option so you can enable two-step verification to further protect yourself. You should see this option show up in your account in the next few days.
When your account has been provisioned with the ability to implement this two factor authentication you will be able to visit https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage to enable it.
I have written before about how important your Microsoft Account is to your connected world and that makes it a very valuable resource that you do not want to lose access to. This extra level of authentication will help you to maintain control of your account and not allow someone to get in by just knowing or guessing one piece of your login process.
This release enables optional two-step verification for your entire Microsoft account. Two-step verification is when we ask you for two pieces of information anytime you access your account — for example, your password plus a code sent to a phone or email on file as security info.
More than a year ago, we began bringing two-step verification for certain critical activities, like editing credit cards and subscriptions at commerce.microsoft.com and xbox.com, or accessing files on another one of your computers through SkyDrive.com. For these scenarios, two-step verification is required 100 percent of the time for everyone, given the sensitive nature of these tasks.
With this release you can choose to protect your entire account with two-step verification, regardless of what service (or device) you are using with your Microsoft account. It’s your choice whether you want to enable this, but for those of you that are looking for ways to add additional security to your account, we’ve worked hard to make set-up really easy.
In this security conscious world where practically everything we do and connect with is online this new security addition to the Microsoft Account will help to ensure we keep our access secure and available.
You can read more about the specific steps to use while setting up and using two-factor authentication on your Microsoft Account at Microsoft Account Gets More Secure on The Official Microsoft Blog.
