Password Not Required

๐Ÿ”’ Secure Bits ๐Ÿ’ก
Do you know what ๐—ฃ๐—”๐—ฆ๐—ฆ๐—ช๐——_๐—ก๐—ข๐—ง๐—ฅ๐—˜๐—ค๐—— means ?

๐Ÿ›‘ This attribute allows an account to have an empty password, even if your password policy is enforced. But before you panicโ€”itโ€™s not as bad as it sounds.

โœ… ๐—›๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒโ€™๐˜€ ๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐—ถ๐˜ ๐˜„๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ธ๐˜€:
A user must have their password manually set to empty at account creation or reset. User can’t just press CTRL-ALT-DEL and change the password to empty.

๐Ÿšจ ๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฏ๐—น๐—ฒ๐—บ?
During security assessments, I often find PASSWD_NOTREQD enabled for ๐˜๐—ผ๐—ฝ ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฎ๐—ด๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐˜€ ๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฑ ๐—–๐—˜๐—ข๐˜€โ€”without any clear reason. Sometimes, IDM tools set this flag, but in many cases, itโ€™s just a misconfiguration waiting to be exploited.

๐Ÿ’ก ๐—›๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐—ธ ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ฟ ๐—”๐—— ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐˜€๐—ธ?
Run this PowerShell command to identify accounts with this attribute:

Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter ‘(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=32))’ -Properties Name, UserPrincipalName | Select-Object Name, UserPrincipalName

Or, use ๐—”๐—— ๐—ฃ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฏ๐—ฒ (my tool) to scan for it automatically.

Have you checked your environment for this misconfiguration? Letโ€™s discuss ๐Ÿ‘‡