Does Microsoft store passwords in clear text?

Question

Microsoft

To activate Office 365, you had to sign in with your account. It was already registered with me, the password for it was stored in KeePass, from which I successfully copied it, but after the first attempt to enter I received the following message:

The Microsoft account password can be up to 16 characters long. If you have used a longer password before, enter the first 16 characters of it.

After shortening my current password to the correct number of characters, I successfully logged into my account. Is it possible to do this without storing the data in clear text?

Answer 1

Yes, you can!
Take a hash from the first 16 characters, then from the rest in Windows it is very similar

Answer 2

Get hash from first 16 characters

I'm sorry, what?

Answer 3

And why is this even technically necessary?

Answer 4

the popular icq service hides the first 8 characters of the password, at least it used to be like this (I haven’t gone to ICQ for a year because of annoying advertising), due to the fact that it has a million audience and the databases are not rubber and somehow their growth can be predicted and maintained them in good condition. Here, suppose they cut off a megabyte for your personal data, let's say with passwords, names (8 characters for a password, another 20 for a nickname, ...), etc. and you can immediately calculate how many users will be able to register in the near future, how much money you need to organize backups, and stuff like that.

Answer 5

I probably don’t understand something, but isn’t it possible to stupidly pass the length of the entered password?

Answer 6

Probably keeps. Maybe not in the open, but in encrypted form, but it stores. There is nothing terrible in this. She also keeps credit card details. You can't store the hash of a credit card. Compared to credit cards, storing passwords is a piece of cake.

Answer 7

Hm. I use a Live ID account - 25 characters, I changed it a couple of years ago.
Indeed, I had to put a 16-digit one on the phone LiveID, with a longer length it was not allowed.