T1201: Password Policy Discovery
| View on MITRE ATT&CK | T1201 |
|---|---|
| Tactic(s) | Discovery |
Data from MITRE ATT&CK®:
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 , 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).
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Cyber Threat Graph Context
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Mitigations for this technique
MITRE ATT&CK Mitigations
How to detect this technique
MITRE ATT&CK Data Components
Command Execution (Command)
The execution of a line of text, potentially with arguments, created from program code (e.g. a cmdlet executed via powershell.exe, interactive commands like >dir, shell executions, etc. )User Account Metadata (User Account)
Contextual data about an account, which may include a username, user ID, environmental data, etc.Process Creation (Process)
The initial construction of an executable managed by the OS, that may involve one or more tasks or threads. (e.g. Win EID 4688, Sysmon EID 1, cmd.exe > net use, etc.)Control Validation Tests for this Technique
Use Atomic Red Team tests to test your defenses against this technique.
Examine password policy - macOS
Examine password complexity policy - FreeBSD
Examine password complexity policy - CentOS/RHEL 7.x
Use of SecEdit.exe to export the local security policy (including the password policy)
Examine local password policy - Windows
Enumerate Active Directory Password Policy with get-addefaultdomainpasswordpolicy
Examine password complexity policy - Ubuntu
Examine password complexity policy - CentOS/RHEL 6.x
Get-DomainPolicy with PowerView
Examine password expiration policy - All Linux
Examine domain password policy - Windows
Examine AWS Password Policy
Sigma Detections for this Technique
SP800-53 Controls
See which controls can help protect against this MITRE ATT&CK technique. This is based on mappings to associated SP800-53 controls produced by the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense.