NIS2 Compliance: Maintaining Credential Security
The NIS2 Directive is the European Union’s sweeping cybersecurity law aimed at raising the baseline of protection across critical industries.
NIS2 Compliance: Maintaining Credential Security
The NIS2 Directive is the European Union’s sweeping cybersecurity law aimed at raising the baseline of protection across critical industries. Enacted in late 2022 and now taking effect via national laws, NIS2 introduces mandatory cybersecurity measures for a broad range of organizations. This includes requirements for risk management, incident reporting, and cyber hygiene practices. In this post, we’ll outline who must comply with NIS2 and then focus on specific provisions, particularly around passwords and identity security, where Enzoic’s solutions help organizations achieve NIS2 compliance.
NIS2 Compliance Scope: Who Has to Comply?
NIS2 significantly expands the scope of the original NIS Directive. It applies to essential and important entities across many critical and digital sectors. In practice, this means medium and large organizations in industries such as energy, transport, healthcare, financial services, digital infrastructure, public administration, and more. These covered organizations are legally required to meet NIS2’s cybersecurity standards, regardless of whether they are private companies or public-sector bodies.
Essential entities (for example, power utilities, hospitals, banks, etc.) and important entities (for example, certain manufacturers, food suppliers, digital services, etc.) are both in scope, though enforcement is stricter for essential entities. In short, if your organization provides services in a critical sector within the EU (and exceeds the size thresholds), you must achieve NIS2 compliance. Non-compliance can lead to significant fines and penalties, so understanding the obligations is crucial. NIS2 is already in force; after the 21-month transposition window, affected organizations need to be compliant as of mid-2024.
Key NIS2 Compliance Requirements for Password & Access Security
NIS2 introduces a comprehensive set of cybersecurity risk management measures that organizations must implement. Article 21 of the directive mandates that companies “take appropriate and proportionate technical, operational and organisational measures to manage the risks” to their network and information systems, and “to prevent or minimise the impact of incidents” on their services. In essence, organizations must practice proactive security to reduce the likelihood of breaches and limit damage if one occurs.
One core theme in NIS2 is improving basic cyber hygiene. The directive explicitly highlights everyday security practices as foundational. For example, Recital 49 notes that a common baseline of cyber hygiene (like regular software updates and “password changes, the management of new installs, the limitation of administrator-level access accounts, and the backing-up of data”) helps create “a proactive framework of preparedness and overall safety” against incidents. In other words, NIS2 recognizes that routine steps, including proper password management, dramatically strengthen an organization’s security posture. The directive even cautions that cyber awareness and hygiene are “essential to enhance the level of cybersecurity within the Union”.
Crucially, NIS2 places a strong emphasis on identity and access security as part of these hygiene measures. Recital 89 encourages organizations to adopt “a wide range of basic cyber hygiene practices, such as zero-trust principles, software updates, device configuration, network segmentation, identity and access management,” along with staff training and awareness to counter threats like phishing and social engineering. In effect, controlling who accesses your systems (and ensuring those user accounts are secure) is a pillar of NIS2 compliance.
This is reflected in the directive’s specific requirements. Article 21(2) lists minimum measures that must be in place, including policies on risk analysis, incident handling, business continuity, and more. Notably, organizations “shall implement basic cyber hygiene practices and cybersecurity training” (Article 21.2(g)) and “shall implement human resources security, access control policies, and asset management” (Article 21.2(i)). In plainer terms, NIS2 obligates companies to enforce strong access controls (covering how users authenticate and what they can access) and to maintain ongoing cyber hygiene programs (which encompass things like password policies and user training).
It’s easy to see why NIS2 stresses these points. Compromised user credentials remain one of the most common pathways attackers use to breach organizations. Weak or stolen passwords open the door for hackers, so NIS2 compels organizations to close that door. The directive’s focus on access control and password hygiene aims to ensure that only authorized users are accessing systems with passwords that are not easily guessable or already compromised. In practice, to comply with NIS2 an organization must implement measures like enforcing strong password policies, detecting and preventing the use of leaked passwords, regularly reviewing accounts with privileged access, and revoking or updating credentials if a breach is suspected.
How Enzoic Helps Achieve NIS2 Compliance
Enzoic’s credential security tools directly align with NIS2’s password and access control requirements, helping organizations meet those guidelines in a practical, automated way. Enzoic focuses on one of the biggest risk areas highlighted by NIS2 (compromised passwords) and provides tools to continuously defend against this threat.
Preventing Use of Breached Passwords: Enzoic maintains an up-to-date database of billions of known compromised credentials (gathered from data breaches, leak sites, and the dark web). By integrating Enzoic with your Active Directory or other login flows, you can automatically screen user passwords against this live database. This means when users set or reset their passwords, any password that appears in known breach lists or is dangerously common can be rejected in real-time. Enzoic essentially enforces a dynamic password ban list in line with NIS2’s call for strong access controls and password hygiene. It goes beyond static complexity rules and directly tackles the real-world risk of reused or stolen passwords.
Continuous Credential Monitoring: NIS2’s risk management approach is not a one-time checklist. It requires ongoing monitoring and prompt mitigation of threats. Enzoic excels here by continuously monitoring your environment’s credentials against new breach data. If an employee’s password or credentials are found in a fresh breach dump, Enzoic can automatically flag that account and prompt an immediate password change (or even disable the account until remediated). This kind of continuous monitoring embodies the proactive practices NIS2 envisions. It ensures that even if credentials are compromised outside your organization (for instance, an employee reused their work password on another breached site), you will quickly identify the vulnerability and remediate it, reducing the window of opportunity for attackers. This directly supports the NIS2 mandate to “manage the risks posed to the security of network and information systems” and to minimize the impact of incidents. In this case, preventing an incident altogether by acting on early warning signs (compromised credentials).
Demonstrating Basic Cyber Hygiene: Using Enzoic is a tangible way to meet the “basic cyber hygiene” control that NIS2 requires. Enzoic helps instill good password hygiene across the user base without relying purely on training. While user education is important, NIS2 recognizes that technical controls are needed to enforce security consistently. Enzoic’s controls ensure every new password chosen by users meets a high security standard (not breached, not on common password lists, etc.), and that any lapse (like a leaked password) is caught and fixed. This automated enforcement and monitoring can be documented as part of your NIS2 compliance evidence. Enzoic provides reporting on password health; for example, listing how many user passwords were found in breaches and were reset as a result. These reports demonstrate to auditors or regulators that your organization has active measures in place to address credential-related risks, fulfilling Articles 21.2(g) and (i). As NIS2 requires assessing the effectiveness of security measures, Enzoic’s metrics can help show that your password policies are not just on paper but are working in practice to eliminate weak or compromised logins.
Supporting Access Control Policies: Beyond passwords themselves, Enzoic complements broader access control policies that NIS2-compliant organizations must have. For example, NIS2 expects organizations to manage account privileges carefully (limit admin accounts, use least privilege, etc.) and to secure authentication methods. Enzoic contributes by ensuring that even privileged accounts are protected with strong, uncompromised credentials. This reduces the risk of a high-impact breach via an admin account using a leaked password, which is a scenario that NIS2’s authors explicitly warned against by including administrator-level access limitations in cyber hygiene guidelines. In essence, Enzoic helps you implement the spirit of zero-trust for identity: never trust a password by default and verify it hasn’t been compromised or exposed before trusting it. This capability acts as a compensating control even if users make mistakes, which strengthens overall compliance.
Importantly, Enzoic’s approach is very much in line with the spirit of the guidance from NIS2 by providing strong dark web monitoring and password analysis capabilities out of the box. By implementing Enzoic, organizations can confidently answer the NIS2 question: “How are you ensuring users aren’t using compromised credentials?” This not only aids compliance but materially reduces your breach risk, which is a win-win outcome envisioned by the directive.
Conclusion
The NIS2 Directive raises the bar for cybersecurity across Europe, and password security is a clear focus within its provisions on cyber hygiene and access control. Any organization falling under NIS2’s scope must take steps to shore up identity security, and failing to do so could mean both regulatory penalties and increased likelihood of devastating breaches. Enzoic’s capabilities map neatly to these requirements by continuously protecting credentials. By preventing the use of known breached passwords and detecting credential compromises in real-time, Enzoic helps organizations directly achieve NIS2 compliance in the areas of password policy, access control, and proactive risk mitigation.
Ensuring that no user or admin account is protected by a compromised or weak password is one such action that supports NIS2 compliance and that Enzoic makes simple to enforce. With Enzoic in place, organizations can strengthen their defense against credential-based attacks and confidently meet the directive’s call for continuous cyber hygiene. This targeted improvement in password management goes a long way toward the high common level of cybersecurity that NIS2 seeks to achieve across essential sectors, ultimately keeping both organizations and the public safer from cyber threats.
AUTHOR
Josh Parsons
Josh is the Product Manager at Enzoic, where he leads the development and execution of strategies to bring innovative threat intelligence solutions to market. Outside of work, he can be found at the nearest bookstore or exploring the city’s local coffee scene.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog | Enzoic authored by Enzoic. Read the original post at: https://www.enzoic.com/blog/nis2-compliance/
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