Adversaries may attempt to access detailed information about the password policy used within an enterprise network or cloud environment. Password policies are a way to enforce complex passwords that are difficult to guess or crack through Brute Force. This information may help the adversary to create a list of common passwords and launch dictionary and/or brute force attacks which adheres to the policy (e.g. if the minimum password length should be 8, then not trying passwords such as 'pass123'; not checking for more than 3-4 passwords per account if the lockout is set to 6 as to not lock out accounts). Password policies can be set and discovered on Windows, Linux, and macOS systems via various command shell utilities such as net accounts (/domain), Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy, chage -l <username>, cat /etc/pam.d/common-password, and pwpolicy getaccountpolicies (Citation: Superuser Linux Password Policies) (Citation: Jamf User Password Policies). Adversaries may also leverage a Network Device CLI on network devices to discover password policy information (e.g. show aaa, show aaa common-criteria policy all).(Citation: US-CERT-TA18-106A) Password policies can be discovered in cloud environments using available APIs such as GetAccountPasswordPolicy in AWS (Citation: AWS GetPasswordPolicy).

Created

Apr 18, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

Modified

Oct 24, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC