There is a certain irony that passwords are commonly relied on as the first line of defense for protecting enterprise applications, data, and IT services, yet they are also broadly recognized as the weakest link in enterprise security.

Concerns about the effectiveness of password-based controls are not unwarranted. Hackers are increasingly inventing new and nefarious methods of cracking passwords, with cracking dictionaries, brute-force attacks, keystroke logging, and phishing schemes. Once cracked or exposed in data breaches, passwords are sold across the dark web to bad actors who will use them to penetrate corporate systems, customer accounts, etc.

With attack vectors around password exploitation rapidly increasing, it is no wonder 1 out of every 4 American citizens was considered to be a cybercrime victim in 2018.

It is a major challenge for companies to stay ahead of these bad actors and prevent them from accessing sensitive systems through weak or compromised passwords.

Read this paper from industry analyst group, EMA, to learn how organizations are ensuring responsible password protection for their employees, users and partners.

Organizations are now adopting tools to enable real-time password policy enforcement with daily password auditing and automated remediation to improve security without increasing IT workload.

With these tools, they can implement compromised password detection, a custom password dictionary, fuzzy matching with common character substitutions, and continuous daily checks of passwords. They can also easily and quickly adopt NIST password requirements and eliminate vulnerable passwords in Active Directory.

Learn more about how automation for password policy enforcement and NIST password guidelines can help your organization.

The most debated topic in the NIST password standards is the guideline to end the policy of password expiration. These forced monthly, quarterly, or periodic password resets are a frustration for many employees, and they are proven to increase IT help desk costs.

Organizations need to secure applications and systems, but employee password reuse across different applications remains a problem. So what can organizations do to protect Active Directory?

They can adopt password filtering for weak, similar, and compromised passwords. Read this article to understand how.