Autumn is here in your IT department, and it’s a particular time of year. After the summer slowdown, activity is picking back up, projects are accelerating, and priorities are being redefined. This season is often a turning point for technical teams: the moment to close the year strong, finalize initiatives, and prepare the ground for the next one. One crucial project is the in-depth audit of your Active Directory passwords. So, as fall begins, will you make time to get it done?
The illusion: a password policy is not a guarantee of security
As a system administrator, you’ve probably already implemented a password policy in your Active Directory environment, whether through a GPO or a PSO. Minimum length, complexity requirements (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, special characters), password history… You’ve fine-tuned the policy to align with best practices. But is that really enough to prevent account compromises due to weak passwords? The hard truth is that it might all be an illusion.
The infamous complexity requirement has become a game for some users. A password like Summer2025! becomes Autumn2025!, then Winter2025!, and so on. The structure is identical, predictable, and therefore weak. Attackers know these patterns all too well and include them in their attack dictionaries, just as they do with passwords derived from your company’s name. Complexity enforces a specific format but doesn’t equate to true strength.
The missing link: awareness of compromised passwords
This is where the most significant flaw lies in Active Directory’s native password management tools. Your AD has no awareness of the outside world. It doesn’t know that a password like SuperP@ssword123!, even though it meets all your complexity rules, may already be sitting in a database of millions of leaked credentials from a past data breach. The password is valid for your AD. To an attacker, it’s a half-open door.
The Password Threat Landscape
To understand why an AD password audit is essential, you must first understand how attackers operate today. Their techniques have become increasingly refined and industrialized.
Password Spraying: Instead of brute-forcing a single account with thousands of passwords (which would trigger an account lockout), attackers take a different approach. They try one or a few very common passwords across many accounts in your organization. This slow, horizontal technique often slips under the radar of detection systems.
Credential Stuffing: This is the most direct threat linked to data breaches. Hackers purchase databases of stolen credentials (email + password) from the dark web. They then exploit a sad but everyday reality: password reuse. Using automated scripts, they attempt to log in to corporate services such as Microsoft 365 or your VPN with those same credentials. If one of your users has reused a compromised password for their Windows login, the attacker gains a foothold.
Dictionary Attacks: Still relevant today, these rely on lists of common passwords, dictionary words, and predictable variations (azerty123, 12345678, company names, etc.).
Faced with these techniques and their associated risks, relying on your users to consistently choose unique, strong passwords is a gamble, and above all, it’s a passive strategy. You need to be proactive.
Take advantage of the summer to run an Active Directory Audit
Autumn is a strategic moment to conduct an AD password audit, and here’s why:
Back-to-business momentum: With operations returning to full speed, it’s the right time to identify risks before year-end.
Remediation planning: The reports you generate now allow you to plan remediation projects for Q4 or the start of the new year.
Budget justification: As many organizations prepare next year’s budgets in the fall, an audit report with clear, impactful statistics becomes a powerful tool for justifying security investments to leadership.
To move from theory to practice, you can rely on Specops Password Auditor, a free tool designed specifically for auditing Active Directory accounts and passwords.
The tool installs in minutes and only reads data from your Active Directory; it makes no changes. It simply retrieves the necessary information (including password hashes) for analysis.
The generated report, available in PDF and French, is much more than a simple list. It’s a map of vulnerabilities related to user accounts and passwords within your directory. Among the key checks:
- Compromised passwords: The flagship feature. The tool compares your AD password hashes against a locally downloaded Specops database of over 1 billion known leaked hashes. You’ll know immediately if your AD accounts have already been exposed.
- Duplicate passwords: This feature identifies users sharing the same password (via hash comparison). A single compromised account could expose many others.
- Empty passwords: A fundamental but still possible weakness, especially on old service accounts.
- Password policy compliance: Benchmarked against best practices from organizations such as ANSSI, CNIL, NIST, BSI, etc.
- Domain administrator accounts
- Admin accounts are not protected from delegation
- Inactive administrator or user accounts
- Accounts with non-expiring passwords
- Accounts with expired passwords
- Password age across all user/admin accounts
Now it’s your turn!
By investing just one hour to download and run Specops Password Auditor this fall, you’ll gain a clear view of the password-related risks in your Active Directory environment. October is the perfect moment to act, and this audit is one you can repeat regularly throughout the year. Download Specops Password Auditor for free here!
