What is Password Audit?

Understanding Password Audit

A password audit is the systematic evaluation of passwords across an organization's systems to identify weak, reused, default, expired, or breached credentials. It measures complexity, length, and uniqueness against policy, then flags risky accounts so they can be reset or hardened before an attacker exploits them.

Auditors typically extract password hashes from directories such as Active Directory (for example via the NTDS.dit database) and run offline cracking tools like Hashcat or John the Ripper against dictionaries, rule sets, and leaked-credential corpora. Modern audits also compare hashes to known-breach lists such as Have I Been Pwned and check for shared passwords, blank passwords, accounts where password-never-expires is set, and admin accounts using guessable values.

This matters because credentials remain the most-abused attack vector. Verizon's DBIR consistently attributes a large share of breaches to stolen or weak passwords, and a single reused admin password can let an attacker pivot from one compromised host to domain-wide control. Without periodic auditing, weak passwords accumulate silently, password-spraying and credential-stuffing attacks succeed, and compliance regimes like PCI DSS and NIST SP 800-63B requirements go unmet. Audits give measurable evidence of credential hygiene rather than assumptions.

For example, a security team copies the domain's hashes during a maintenance window, runs Hashcat with a wordlist plus mutation rules, and discovers that 18 percent of users chose seasonal patterns like "Summer2026!" and that three service accounts share an identical never-expiring password. They force resets, enforce a longer minimum length and a banned-password list, enroll those accounts in MFA, and rerun the audit the following quarter to confirm the weak-password rate dropped below their target threshold.