14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has started the rollout of a new Windows 11 preview build to insiders enrolled in the Dev channel. The update doesn’t bring too many new features, though it’s still a welcome release given the included fixes.
Windows 11 build 25206 includes Dynamic Refresh Rate support on external support, though it’s important to know that you must be running the latest GPU drivers before being able to this new setting out.
“Windows Insiders can now save power by using Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR) on external displays! To enable this setting, you must have a 120+Hz monitor with VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support, as well as a WDDM 3.1 driver installed. To select a dynamic refresh rate, go to Settings > System > Display > Advanced display and make your selection under Refresh rate,” Microsoft explains in the official announcement.
In addition, this build also comes with improvements for the way you copy sensitive content, as the clipboard history can now handle password fields as well.
And last but not least, Microsoft is introducing new SMB authentication rate limiter behavior changes in this new build.
“The SMB authentication rate limiter in Insider Preview builds has added an additional protection mechanism to the SMB server service: it implements a delay between each failed NTLM authentication,” Microsoft explains.
“This means if an attacker previously sent 300 brute force attempts per second from a client for 5 minutes (90,000 passwords), the same number of attempts would now take at least 50 hours. The goal here is to make a Windows client an unattractive target either when in a workgroup or for its local accounts when joined to a domain. Even though the SMB server runs by default in all versions of Windows, it’s not accessible by default unless you intentionally open the firewall or create a customer SMB share that opens the firewall.”
So with the new build, Microsoft is making changes that should help further protect Windows 11 devices, though they aren’t available for Windows Server insiders just yet.
“Starting in Build 25206, it 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,” the company explains.