Windows 11 will soon release a feature that attacks from the root, one of the worst and most common habits of many users. There are so many that, if we remember, it is possible that we all did it sometime, either recently or years ago. Personally, it doesn’t hurt to admit that I’m on that list, although it’s true that in my case it’s been a long time, but I know people who have it in common practice today.

I mean, maybe you’ve figured it out, save passwords (one, several or all) in a plain text document, unencrypted. Whether it’s a document from your word processor called “Notes to my first novel.docx” or a note created with Notepad called “passwords.txt”, this common habit ensures that anyone who has access to our computer , whether physically or remotely, will have access to all the services whose security we have compromised with this document. And Windows 11 intends to warn about this.

So as we can read in WindowsLatest, from the hand of Windows 11 22H2, the already announced Sun Valley update, SmartScreen will add a new security feature, the function of which will be notifies the user when entering a password in an insecure environment. This feature looks at applications like Notepad, as well as programs it identifies as malicious, and in all such cases displays a pop-up window alerting you to the security risks of what it’s doing so it has a chance to come back before it’s too late .

This is a new feature called Microsoft acts at the core levelis able detect password entry in any system application, so we can say that its scope within Windows 11 will be universal. Its main goal, as you can deduce from its function, is to prevent phishing, to prevent users from entering their passwords by mistake on sites that pretend to be legitimate, from everything from social networks to online banking. However, due to its ability to detect the use of passwords in any environment, it extends to other insecure actions.

Passwords are still one of the weakest points of security today.. And so, despite the existence of applications and services for their management, such as the six for Android that we recently recommended, there are many users who continue to do without this option and instead use insecure passwords, repeating the same login details in multiple services and manage them by saving them in Notepad. If this new feature in Windows 11 does anything to improve it, it will no doubt be a big win for Microsoft.