I'm not exactly calling bullshit, but I've worked almost the entire last decade in IT in a Windows environment that has a decent amount of RDP use and has grown from ~2000-4000 employees during that time.

We've never encountered this as described. Whatever this situation that allows the cached password to persist indefinitely is, it is a situation that would need to be engineered by the attacker.

From what I can tell, this "exploit" is just the standard NT password caching functionality that Windows has had for literal decades. Windows caches the last valid password used to log in, so if you lose your connection to your identity provider (AD or Entra) you can still log in with the last password confirmed to be valid.

In AD environments, this is what allows you to log into your laptop at home before you connect to VPN. You can't hit your work AD before you're on the work network. It also causes some fun because if you changed your password at work but didn't lock and unlock your computer with the new one, it might still have your old one cached for the login screen but need the new one for VPN. This was a fairly common support call (I'm out of direct user support now so I can't easily see if it still is).

Any situation where an old password would be valid indefinitely and a new one not recognized would require the machine to not be able to reach AD or Entra, but also to still be reachable by RDP... indefinitely. That's definitely not impossible, but it's one hell of an edge case to use the term "indefinitely" for.

It's annoying that there aren't separate settings from "local logins with AD as the IDP" and "remote logins with RDP" or "logins with Entra", but this feature is pretty damn critical for remote workers to be able to function and it is an intentional design choice as Microsoft states. Any potential workaround for a theoretical lack of this functionality is worse than the current state. Can't rotate passwords on a local break glass account if the machine can't reach your IDP, leaving effectively the same hole except with an account known to have elevated access.

There's no nefariousness here or lack of due dilligence. Labeling it as some horribly dangerous security hole with the amount of vagueness this article has is just misleading and clickbaity.

Yeah, but "some cases" is extremely vague. If it is indeed cached indefinitely under all circumstances I would expect changed passwords to never work at all.

If it is just "some cases" it could be anything from the system using a stale cache just when it can not reach the online server (reasonable) over caches still being in some kind of TTL period to some sort of bug.

"We originally looked at a code change for this issue, but after further review of design documentation, changes to code could break compatibility with functionality used by many applications."

Year of the Linux (Server|Desktop). Seriously. If you are in IT pls look into this (and hide your RDP server behind some VPN. No not MS RDP Gateway.)