When Identity Security Becomes a Wall — Not a Shield

After a breach that forced a reset of my digital identity, I hit a roadblock I never anticipated: multi-factor authentication (2FA) locked me out of critical Microsoft services with no reliable way to prove who I was.

Despite years of interaction, billing history, and documented correspondence, access couldn’t be restored. Support channels were opaque. Recovery methods? Virtually nonexistent.

🧩 The Fallout

This isn’t just a tale of frustration — it’s a wake-up call for anyone who depends on digital platforms for professional continuity. Here's what made this situation particularly troubling:

• 2FA mechanisms ignored reset conditions and created a closed loop
• Microsoft’s support structure lacked escalation flexibility for identity restoration
• Existing billing relationships didn’t help validate re-entry
• Submission of supporting materials was not possible due to access barriers
• Communication was throttled by the very safeguards meant to protect users

📁 Appendix Overview (Bullet Format)

Though I’ve withheld raw screenshots for privacy, the underlying evidence includes:

• Email chains across multiple support tiers
• Billing confirmation across service subscriptions
• Failed attempts to upload documents for verification
• Timeline logs of authentication attempts
• Chat transcripts documenting escalation effort
• Account alerts post-identity reset
• Case numbers and references from support tools
• License access history and dashboard exclusions
• Anomalies in MFA re-enrollment
• Failed access attempts after password and device reset
• Time-based snapshot of support delays and breakdowns

🔄 What’s Next?

This blog isn’t about placing blame — it’s about demanding resilience. If identity protection policies don’t account for edge-case scenarios, platform continuity suffers.

Lesson learned: Security tools should protect users with them, not from them.

Did Microsoft buy GitHub?

Two days ago it was a rumor but according to a post on Mashable (https://mashable.com/2018/06/03/microsoft-github-acquistion/#7oGpfyPu4Oqt) it seems to have acquired GitHub to be announced on Monday. It is supposed to be valued at $2B but GitHub thinks it's true value exceeds the offer.

It was also on Bloomberg TV Channel.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github

What does Cortana Intelligence Suite consists of?

That is quite a big question. Probably you have conversed with Cortana, if you are a Windows Phone user but Cortana does a lot more than that. Cortana is the foundational basis of Microsoft's AI ambitions. This makes it important to get a handle of this as AI is deemed to be the most important technology in the future. Cortana is also good at searching here is an early question I posed to Cortana asking for image identification from the web.

Cortana_DT.png

You have tons of data, overwhelmingly huge, and how do you get intelligence out of this? The answer to using this intelligently is Cortana Intelligence suite.

CortanaIntelSuite_00

What does Cortana Intelligence Suite consist of?

It consists of almost all of the important developments at Microsoft in the past decades. Here is a overview diagram from Microsoft's site here.

CortanaIntelSuite_01.PNG

The key features are:

Information Management: Data Orchestration on a fully managed, end-to-end Cloud Platform.
  Azure Data Factory - Build pipelines and colect data from   services
  Azure Data Catalog - effective management of data sources
  Azure Event Hub- staging site for incoming stream data

Big Data Stores:
Azure SQL Data Warehouses for storing and managing structured data with elastic scaling and massive parallel processing capabilities
Azure Data Lake Store for massive throughput and analytics

Machine Learning and Analytics:
Azure Machine Learning-Design and publish predictive models
Azure HDInsight: Analyze data in Storm and Spark for Hadoop
Azure Data Lake and Stream Analytics: Integrating code from R or Python and analyze any kind or any size of data.
Microsoft BI for rich data visualizations

Intelligence:
Cognitive Services - enable natural and contextual interactions; Integrate models with Cortana using speech and receive proactive notifications
Bot Framework: Build Bots to interact with Users wherever they are using SMS to Skype, Office 365

Here  are some customers who have come on board to implement.

CortanaIntelSuite_02.PNG

What is Web RTC?

WebRTC is still evolving although it has already made a big presence.

WebRTC stands for Web-based Real-Time Communications. It is free and the WebRTC project provides mobile applications and browsers to have communication capabilities using simple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).  Since voice and video are involved it is complicated because of various standards it has to contend with.

WebRTC is supported by Google, Mozilla, Opera and others. Microsoft is not in the list having differences over some of the details such as Google's VP8 video codec to become the default.

Microsoft has its own web based communication which is called CU-RTC-WEB. Microsoft acquired Skype which has browser-based version of voice and video calling application and it is in Microsoft's interest to stay with evolving WebRTC.

The key resource is WebRTC.org.

Here are the components of WebRTC, a screen shot from the WebRTC site.

If you are interested in the under-the-hood details of WebRTC go here (http://www.webrtc.org/reference/webrtc-components).

Here is video of browser based communication between Mozilla and Chrome.

Read more on how the technology is evolving;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2849392/does-skype-for-web-mean-webrtc-is-ready-for-prime-time.html

Do you want to change the ports that Skype use?

The ports that Skype (version 6.11)  uses are 443 and 80 by default. These ports are also used by other programs like IIS, XAMPP etc. Some times you may need to change the port that skype uses to some other port.

You can change the ports that Skype uses by first launching SKYPE,

Click Tools and then Options.... Now you see the defaults when you click Advanced and followed by clicking Connection as shown.

Uncheck the check box and choose a different port. The new ports will become acctive when you start SKYPE next time. I had to quit the program and login again to display the changed conditions.