Q: My company wants to enhance the quality of the passwords that users use to log on to our Windows systems. Can you offer some guidelines on which tools and best practices we should use to enhance password quality?
I have three important recommendations for enhancing password quality in a Windows environment: Use the built-in Windows password policies, provide users with guidelines for choosing high-quality passwords, and regularly audit the password quality. These recommendations form your first line of defense against hackers and malicious users trying to exploit the inherent weaknesses of passwords.
Table 1 presents an overview of all password-related Group Policy Object (GPO) settings; the password policy settings are the most important ones. Administrators can use GPOs to centrally control system configuration settings of Windows workstations and servers in a domain environment. Password policy settings, as with any account policy setting, can be defined only on the domain level. You can't enforce a specific password policy for the users in a particular Active Directory (AD) organizational unit (OU) for example. . . .
Register
