Requiring complex passwords in your network

With the tools that attackers have available today, simple passwords should be outlawed by every company. Turning on the requirement for complex passwords in your network is pretty simple; the hard part is knowing where to find the setting. We are going to require complex passwords by making a change inside Group Policy. Further on in this book, we are going to do a lot of things inside Group Policy, but the requirement for complex passwords is so common that I felt it to be a general security item rather than something to be lumped alongside other Group Policy tasks. So, we will be using Group Policy in a step-by-step fashion, and combining this recipe with the chapter on Group Policy will give you even more creativity in the way that you could later change the implementation of this password policy.

Getting ready

We need to be working in a domain environment, as Group Policy is something that runs within Active Directory. The change that we are...