It is conceivable that they wanted to express "although encrypted in transit, it is not hashed and Microsoft can recover the full password". However, you'd have

It is conceivable that they wanted to express "although encrypted in transit, it is not hashed and Microsoft can recover the full password". However, you'd have to be very charitable to interpret the articale like that. This is not a translation error either. The same mistake can be found in the German original. > Did whoever write this realize you need to be able to recover the cleartext for this to even work? The first author of the article has a degree in 'commercial information technology' and has worked as a sysadmin, so I assume they do understand that this is necessary, they may just have done a bad job of expressing that. An article in a technical outlet should still do better in such regards.