PCI DSS Active Directory password policy requirements

At the end of 2004, five major credit card companies (American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard, and Visa Inc.) banded together to create the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in an attempt curb data fraud in the finance sector. Any organization that wants to process, store, or transmit credit card data must ensure that they comply with the mandated PCI DSS password policy requirements. This is clearly laid out in clause 3.2, section 8.

Protect AD user accounts

To be PCI DSS compliant, organizations must enforce the password policy requirements mentioned in section 8 to authenticate Active Directory (AD) user accounts.

PCI DSS 3.2, section 8

This section specifies the requirements for all domain user passwords used to log in to the system through which payment data could be accessed.

Passwords should:

1. Be a minimum of seven characters long.
2. Include numbers.
3. Expire within ninety days.
4. Not be identical to the previous four passwords.

Simplify PCI DSS compliance with ADSelfService Plus

ADSelfService Plus offers advanced password policy settings to ensure your company complies with the requirements of PCI DSS. You can create a custom password policy that meets all the PCI DSS requirements and enforce it for all or specific AD users based on their domain, organizational unit (OU), or group membership.

1. Enforce password history: Ensure password strength by enforcing password history during native password resets in the Windows Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) console.
2. Set a custom password length: Enforce longer passwords for Windows domain users by specifying the minimum password length.
3. Ensure password complexity: Ensure user passwords contain uppercase, lowercase, special, and numeric characters.

Even with the above mentioned PCI-mandated password policy controls in place, user passwords are  vulnerable to credential-based attacks including brute-force, dictionary, and password spray.

ADSelfService Plus helps organizations keep up with the evolving cyber threat landscape by enabling admins to:

1. Ban leaked or weak passwords, keyboard sequences, and palindromes.
2. Restrict consecutively repeated characters from the username or old password, as well as common character types at the beginning or end of passwords.
3. Display a Password Strength Meter when users change or reset their AD passwords.
4. Enforce passphrases by overriding password complexity if the user password length is above a set number.
5. Comply with NIST, CJIS, and HIPAA regulations