Microsoft Is Retiring RC4 Encryption in Kerberos: What Rural Hospital IT Teams Need to Know
If your organization runs on-premises Active Directory (and most rural health care organizations still do), there is a change coming in April 2026 that could break authentication across your environment if you have not prepared for it. Microsoft is retiring RC4 as the default fallback encryption for Kerberos ticket issuance on domain controllers. For environments that have been quietly relying on this decades-old fallback without realizing it, the April cumulative update will disable it by default.
