Why password complexity is so important for your organization

Passwords are a big part of your Active Directory (AD) environment. As an administrator, you have to enforce strict password policies to ensure better security for your AD environment, but these policies are often difficult for users to adhere to. Despite being strict, password policies should satisfy requirements and save users from the dilemmas that come along with creating strong, secure passwords and regularly changing those passwords.

How important are strict password policies?

According to Digicert, 73 percent of users have the same password for multiple sites. If you or your users fall into this statistic and one of your passwords is compromised, you put yourself at risk of losing confidential information from other sites as well. AD users' passwords need to be complex in order to make hacking into these accounts difficult, as hackers use various approaches to crack passwords including intelligent guessing, dictionary attacks, and brute-force automated attacks. Given enough time, an automated method can crack any password.

The best way to ensure strong passwords

Ultimately, the best way to secure passwords is to find a solution that has fine-grained password policies and works with both AD and Group Policy. An efficient password policy solution should do the following:
  • Protect against recent password attacks.
  • Use the current AD organizational unit design.
  • Allow the use of different password policy enhancements in a single domain.
  • Import dictionaries to prevent the use of certain words as passwords.
  • Provide password pattern controls.
  Imagine if you could avoid weak passwords altogether. With a strong password policy, you won't have to just imagine it—it could be your reality. Unfortunately, AD does not provide native tools for this capability.ADSelfService Plus’ password policy enforcer, on the other hand, allows you to set multiple custom password policies in a single AD domain. The password policy enforcer solves the issue of weak passwords by requiring passwords in AD to be strong and secure, ensuring your organization is safe. ADSelfService Plus helps you implement additional controls over your passwords without having to redesign your existing AD environment, which you can see below in Figure 1.Figure 1. Custom password attributes allowed by ADSelfService Plus' Password Policy Enforcer. ADSelfService Plus provides the protection your AD users' passwords need. With ADSelfService Plus, you can have multiple password policies in a single domain, which helps protect you against dictionary and password pattern attacks. ADSelfService Plus is a secure solution that is easy to implement, configure, and manage for any AD domain. To enhance your security without compromising on productivity, check out ADSelfService Plus’ password policy enhancer now.