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Require a secure password change for elevated user risk

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Microsoft works with researchers, law enforcement, various security teams at Microsoft, and other trusted sources to find leaked username and password pairs. Organizations with Microsoft Entra ID P2 licenses can create Conditional Access policies incorporating Microsoft Entra ID Protection user risk detections.

User exclusions

Conditional Access policies are powerful tools, we recommend excluding the following accounts from your policies:

  • Emergency access or break-glass accounts to prevent lockout due to policy misconfiguration. In the unlikely scenario all administrators are locked out, your emergency-access administrative account can be used to log in and take steps to recover access.
  • Service accounts and Service principals, such as the Microsoft Entra Connect Sync Account. Service accounts are non-interactive accounts that aren't tied to any particular user. They're normally used by back-end services allowing programmatic access to applications, but are also used to sign in to systems for administrative purposes. Calls made by service principals won't be blocked by Conditional Access policies scoped to users. Use Conditional Access for workload identities to define policies targeting service principals.
    • If your organization has these accounts in use in scripts or code, consider replacing them with managed identities.

Template deployment

Organizations can choose to deploy this policy using the steps outlined below or using the Conditional Access templates.

Enable with Conditional Access policy

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least a Conditional Access Administrator.
  2. Browse to Protection > Conditional Access.
  3. Select New policy.
  4. Give your policy a name. We recommend that organizations create a meaningful standard for the names of their policies.
  5. Under Assignments, select Users or workload identities.
    1. Under Include, select All users.
    2. Under Exclude, select Users and groups and choose your organization's emergency access or break-glass accounts.
    3. Select Done.
  6. Under Cloud apps or actions > Include, select All resources (formerly 'All cloud apps').
  7. Under Conditions > User risk, set Configure to Yes.
    1. Under Configure user risk levels needed for policy to be enforced, select High. This guidance is based on Microsoft recommendations and might be different for each organization
    2. Select Done.
  8. Under Access controls > Grant, select Grant access.
    1. Select Require authentication strength, then select the built-in Multifactor authentication authentication strength from the list.
    2. Select Require password change.
    3. Select Select.
  9. Under Session.
    1. Select Sign-in frequency.
    2. Ensure Every time is selected.
    3. Select Select.
  10. Confirm your settings and set Enable policy to Report-only.
  11. Select Create to create to enable your policy.

After administrators confirm the settings using report-only mode, they can move the Enable policy toggle from Report-only to On.

Passwordless scenarios

For organizations that adopt passwordless authentication methods make the following changes:

Update your passwordless user risk policy

  1. Under Users:
    1. Include, select Users and groups and target your passwordless users.
  2. Under Access controls > Block access for passwordless users.

Tip

You might need to have two policies for a period of time while deploying passwordless methods.

  • One that allows self-remediation for those not using passwordless methods.
  • Another that blocks passwordless users at high risk.

Remediate and unblock passwordless user risk

  1. Require administrator investigation and remediation of any risk.
  2. Unblock the user.

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