Wilson: Easy as Pie – MFA in Office 365

I’ve just completed an interview with our contributor Denis Wilson who shared with us reports on a 600% increase (January 2020 – May 2020) in “cloud hacking” by bad actors targeting Office 365, G-suite and such. I was scared straight!

So in-part, we used the interview HERE to get me off the dime in real-time to turn on Multi-factor Authentication in Office 365 using these steps.

1. Logon as the administrator to your Office 365 instance via the web.
2. Click on the Admin
3. Expand the Users selection on the left.
4. Select Active Users.
5. Select Multi-Factor authentication
6. I recommend you click the hyper-link in the introductory paragraph on the multi-factor authentication The link is “multi-factor auth deployment guide”
7. The above action will launch a new window that presents the “How it works: Azure Multi-Factor Authentication It takes two minutes to read. Do it NOW and you can find it HERE.
8. Return to the multi-factor authentication
9. Select the users for whom you want to enable multi-factor authentication (e.g. Harry Brelsford)
10. Click Enable.
11. Carefully read the About enabling multi-factor auth dialog box.
12. Copy the following link https://aka.ms/MFASetup and send it to the users you will enable.
13. Click the enable multi-factor auth
14. On the Updates successful dialog box, click close.
15. Click the link mentioned in Step 12 above: https://aka.ms/MFASetup
16. Check your phone for a text with a six digit code to place on a new page that opened in the Office 365 site to enter the code. This is a common practice with many multi-factor authentication scenarios such as your back.
17. On the Additional security verification App Passwords page, configure your preferred options. I selected the Authentication phone checkbox and it already had populated the phone number field with my mobile phone.
18. Consider watching the three-minute video from Microsoft on YouTube titled How to register for Azure Multi-Factor Authentication. Click on the View video to know how to secure your account link to watch or your can access it HERE. This video explains how you can receive a code to a mobile app instead of via text to your phone.
19. Click Save.
20. Take a bow – you are now setup with multi-factor authentication in Office 365.