T1201: Password Policy Discovery

Adversaries may attempt to access detailed information about the password policy used within an enterprise network. Password policies for networks are a way to enforce complex passwords that are difficult to guess or crack through Brute Force. This would help 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, macOS systems via various command shell utilities such as net accounts (/domain), Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy, chage -l, cat /etc/pam.d/common-password, and pwpolicy get account policies.

Example

Utilizing the net accounts command