Simplify NIST Password Guidelines with SpyCloud Active Directory Guardian

To help organizations mitigate the risk posed by users’ bad password habits, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) designed a set of password guidelines with human behavior in mind. While most of NIST’s latest password guidelines can be enforced directly within directory services like Active Directory, there’s a critical exception: banning “commonly used, expected, or compromised” passwords. And as we all know, new password exposures happen constantly.

This guide lays out the risks of password exposure, breaks down the key updates to NIST’s latest password guidelines, and explains how SpyCloud Active Directory Guardian implements many of the recommendations for you by:

• Automatically blocking weak or banned passwords before they become a problem
• Continuously monitoring for exposed user passwords within your workforce
• Automatically remediating compromised passwords within five minutes of discovery