You know what really charrs my veal? When websites or apps you're using randomly sign you out at the worst possible time.
Your boss has sent you something urgent, but you can't reply in time due to the rigour
moral of signing back in, and suddenly you're unemployed and out on the streets.
Hey, if it happened to me, it could happen to you. Okay, maybe it's not a fat dire, but services that end your session with no warning are
infuriating. So, why does it happen? Typically, it comes down to the service trying to keep you secure in some way.
And I get it, staying safe online is super important.
But why is signing you out a solution? Typically, services can sign you out after a certain amount of time has passed since
your last sign in or since you were last active.
This is to help prevent an attacker who has broken into your account from having access
to it indefinitely. Let's say that someone gets into your PC, where you're already signed into a service
that you use all the time. Having an expiration date on your session, which can be done through the use of cookies
if you're going through a web browser, means that at some point, the attacker will need
to actually have your password and possibly your two-factor device to get back in.
Different services can set very different sign-in intervals, explaining why you might
never have problems with something like Twitter, while Gmail can be very annoying when you're
trying to pull up an important work message or a sheet or a doc.
Of course, this sign-in duration thing isn't exactly foolproof, so a service might make
you sign back in if it detects something is amiss through a technique called fingerprinting.
This is when a service collects data on you to make it easier to identify you.
And although this obviously raises privacy concerns, it can help from a security perspective.
For example, sites can track everything from your location to the size of the screen you're
using to your audio configuration. And if there's enough of a change in those things the next time you use the service,
it may trigger a request to sign in again. Just in case these changes aren't the result of simply using your laptop in a different
location when you get off the airplane, and it's actually the result of an attacker trying
to drain your bank account. But because fingerprinting has plenty of privacy-conscious critics, certain browsers are trying to make
it difficult for services to track you for any reason.
Therefore, it's becoming more common for browsers to block or delete tracking cookies,
especially if they originate from a different domain. One funny example is if you're trying to use Microsoft Teams, your browser might be
deleting cookies from Skype.com, which actually ties into the team's service.
So you might get prompts to sign in more often than you'd expect, or even more often
than Microsoft themselves would like.
Thanks Microsoft. Alright, fine. All this inconvenience is here to keep me safe.
That might be alright if this actually worked as intended, but it often doesn't.
Sometimes you can get signed out because your organization doesn't manage saved credentials
correctly. This is a huge problem with services often used for office communications, like Teams.
Other times, authentication issues can rear their ugly heads. For example, the much-blind Microsoft Teams works together with the Microsoft Authenticator
app if you're trying to use it on a smartphone. So if Teams is misbehaving, you might burn lots of time trying to solve the issue with
the Teams app itself when the actual solution is to clear the Authenticator's cache and
restart it. So the bottom line is that unless something on your device or within your organization
is configured incorrectly, you might be at the mercy of this service themselves.
So stay cool if you're randomly asked to sign in again, and remember not to try and
punch in your 20-character password while you're driving on the freeway.
The cops probably won't buy your juice of being safety conscious.
So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comment section of course
with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.