Password dictionary overview and best practice

As long as users continue using common/predictable passwords, dictionary attacks will continue to work. Hackers are not the only ones who can take advantage of password predictability. The best protection against a dictionary attack is using a dictionary during... Read More

Group Policy Caching

How things work: Group Policy Caching

The release of Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 introduced a new Group Policy concept called Group Policy Caching. Its purpose is to reduce the time it takes to perform certain scenarios for synchronous foreground Group Policy refresh. Here’s... Read More

The role of passwords in HIPAA compliance

Healthcare is a high value target for hackers given the nature of the data and its poor security stance – ranking the sixth lowest, in security performance across industries. Passwords are the first line of defense against cyberattacks and... Read More

specops software logo

What the password quiz taught us

In celebration of World Password Day we ran a password quiz that presented participants with five pairs of passwords, and asked them to pick out the stronger one from each pair. The results? Only 12% of participants answered all... Read More

License import errors in Specops Password Policy

Following a Specops Password Policy installation (and in some cases an upgrade), you will need to import your license. The process is pretty seamless, but there are some errors you may encounter. In this blog post, we’ll walk through... Read More

Disallow special characters in Specops Password Policy

Disallow special characters in Specops Password Policy

In this post, we will demonstrate how to disallow the use of special characters in passwords, in this case Swedish character, by using the “regular expression” setting in Specops Password Policy. Before getting started, ensure that you have installed... Read More