Microsoft has begun rolling out a new preview build of Windows 11 to insiders registered in the Dev channel. The update doesn’t bring too many new features, although it’s still a welcome release considering the fixes included.
Windows 11 build 25206 includes support for dynamic refresh rate on external media, although it’s important to know that you need to be running the latest GPU drivers before you can use this new setup.
“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 ), along with an installed WDDM 3.1 driver. 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.
Additionally, this release also brings improvements for the way you copy sensitive content, as the clipboard history can now also handle password fields.
And finally, Microsoft introduces new changes in the behavior of the SMB authentication rate limiter in this new version.
“The SMB Authentication Rate Limiter in Insider Preview builds added an additional protection mechanism to the SMB Server service: it implements a delay between each NTLM authentication failure,” Microsoft explains.
“This means that 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. ‘a Windows client an unattractive target, either when in a workgroup or for their local accounts when joined to a domain.Even though the SMB server runs by default in all versions of Windows, it is not accessible by default unless you intentionally open the firewall or create a client SMB share that opens the firewall.
So with the new release, Microsoft is making changes that should help further protect Windows 11 devices, although they’re not yet available to Windows Server Insiders.
“As of Build 25206, it is enabled by default and set to 2000ms (2 seconds). Any wrong username or password sent to SMB will now cause a 2 second delay by default in all editions of Windows Insiders. When first released on Windows Insiders, this protection mechanism was disabled by default. This behavior change has not been made to Windows Server Insiders, it still defaults to 0,” the company explains.