Just a day after announcing that Windows 11 2022, known to Insiders as 22H2, is beginning to roll out to the general public, Microsof has released yet another Dev Channel build for Windows 11 Insiders. The latest build, version 25206, is mainly filled with fixes, but there’s one new improvement to SMB authentication:
Starting in Build 25206, it (the SMB authentication rate limiter) is on by default and set to 2000ms (2 seconds). Any bad usernames or passwords sent to SMB will now cause a 2 second delay by default in all editions of Windows Insiders. When first released to Windows Insiders, this protection mechanism was off by default. This behavior change was not made to Windows Server Insiders, it still defaults to 0.
Basically, Microsoft is trying to make it harder for hackers to succeed in brute force attacks by increasing the amount of time each attempt requires.
In addition, 25206 includes a number of improvements, including adding the ability to use Dynamic Refresh Rate on external monitors to save power, adding recent file activity for cloud files to File Explorer home, and an ability (rolling out) to add the use of Clipboard History to password fields (yay!).
There’s a number of new fixes and Known Issues, too, be sure to check them out in the blog post.
