Password Policy Discovery

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](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1110). 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 , 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](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/008) 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).

Linked Issues

Issuelinks
Linktyp	Issue
is related to	Techniques
is blocked by	Password Policy Discovery – cross-platform behavior-chain analytics
is blocked by	Password Policies
is blocked by	Security, Compliance & Resilience Controls Oversight
is blocked by	Secure Baseline Configurations
is blocked by	Continuous Monitoring
is blocked by	Malicious Code Protection (Anti-Malware)

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