Celebrate National Password Day 2025 by Automating Password Security

Good password hygiene is a fundamental defense against unauthorized access, yet it remains a weak point for many organizations. National Password Day is a timely reminder to examine how credentials are managed. Studies show that poor password practices lead directly to breaches.

For example, Varonis reports that 81% of confirmed data breaches involved weak, reused, or stolen passwords. Similarly, a recent Cloudflare analysis found that roughly 41% of successful logins used credentials that had already appeared in known data breaches. At the same time, multi-factor authentication (MFA) remains under-deployed.

In fact, only about 50% of users have enabled MFA on their accounts. Without a second factor, any stolen password can immediately lead to account takeover. To address these gaps, security teams should automate enforcement of password policies.

Blink Ops provides a no-code workflow engine that can integrate with identity providers, messaging tools, and ticketing systems to implement these checks and actions continuously across your environment. For security teams, these statistics highlight the need for vigilance: credential hygiene genuinely cannot be a one-time project.

Below are three practical Blink workflows that improve password hygiene by enforcing MFA, automating password expiration reminders, and detecting compromised or reused passwords. Each workflow includes a description, a step-by-step outline, and the immediate value it delivers.

1. Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Compliance

This workflow ensures that all required user accounts have MFA enabled, according to policy. Without MFA, a compromised password grants direct access to an account, so enforcing MFA is a high-impact control. Blink automation regularly checks your directory or identity provider (e.g. Okta, Azure AD, etc.) for any accounts missing the mandated second factor. It then triggers notifications or tickets so that administrators or users can take corrective action promptly. This guarantees that MFA enforcement is continuous and up-to-date, rather than left to periodic manual audits. (It is also essential for compliance: many standards like PCI DSS and HIPAA explicitly require MFA on privileged accounts.)

Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Schedule the workflow to run at a regular interval (e.g. every morning) or trigger it when a new user account is created in the identity system.
2. Use Blink to call the identity provider’s API and retrieve a list of active users and their MFA enrollment status.
3. Filter the list to identify accounts that do not have MFA enabled or do not meet your MFA requirements (for example, missing an authenticator app or hardware token).
4. For non-compliant users, Blink can notify via Slack/email, create ITSM tickets (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira), escalate to security, or temporarily disable accounts to enforce MFA enrollment if unresolved by the deadline.
5. Finally, log each flagged account and action taken (for example, in a database or spreadsheet) so you can audit compliance over time.

Immediate Value

By automating the MFA check, you enforce a valuable security control continuously. The team immediately gets visibility into any accounts lacking MFA and can prompt users to fix it before attackers can exploit those accounts. Enabling MFA helps prevent attacks that use automated attempts to guess passwords. In practice, this Blink workflow closes a common security gap: it prevents accounts from remaining unprotected due to overlooked MFA requirements.

2. Automate Password Rotation Reminders

Many organizations still enforce periodic password changes (for example, every 60 or 90 days) to reduce the window of exposure if credentials are stolen. Tracking password age for all users manually is error-prone. This workflow automatically identifies users whose passwords are nearing expiration (or already expired) and sends them timely reminders to update their password.

Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Schedule the workflow to run daily or weekly, depending on your password policy frequency.
2. Use Blink to query your directory or identity provider (like Azure AD, Okta, or LDAP) for all active users and their password last-changed timestamp.
3. Filter the results to find users whose passwords have not been changed within the required interval (e.g. passwords older than 60 or 90 days).
4. If a user's password is old or has expired, send them an automatic reminder. For example, you could send a direct message on Slack or an email letting them know their password is about to expire (or already has). Include a link or clear steps to update their password. You can also create a ticket in your ITSM system to help managers keep track or ensure everything is done correctly.
5. Log that the reminder was sent. You can also track that the user updated their password afterwards (if your identity system provides that status).

Immediate Value

This automation takes the guesswork out of password expiration policies. Instead of relying on manual reports or user memory, Blink automatically nudges each user at the right time. This leads to higher compliance and prevents unexpected account lockouts. The team saves time (no more running ad-hoc queries for aging passwords), and users get a smooth, timely reminder just when they need it. Overall, it ensures password rotation policies are enforced on schedule without manual effort. This is valuable in regulated environments, since it virtually eliminates the chance of missing an expiry deadline.

3. Detect and Alert on Compromised Passwords

Even with strong policies, users may still use passwords that have been exposed in breaches or reuse the same password in multiple places. This workflow proactively scans for such risky credentials and alerts users or admins immediately. By integrating with breach data sources, Blink can flag compromised or duplicate passwords in your environment.

Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Schedule this workflow to run on a regular basis (e.g. daily) or trigger it after specific events (such as a password change or account creation).
2. Use Blink to retrieve all user accounts to check (for example, from your HR system, directory, or credential database).
3. For each account, call a compromised-credentials API. For example, use the Have I Been Pwned “Pwned Passwords” API with k-anonymity (the password is hashed locally and checked against a breached hash database). Alternatively, use your identity provider’s breach-detection integration if available.
4. Identify any accounts where the password appears in a breach or is known to be reused. If a user has multiple accounts, you could compare hashes or use your password manager’s API to detect duplicates.
5. Notify flagged users via secure email/Slack about breached/reused passwords and instruct immediate changes. Optionally, create a ticket to reset logins. Alert the security team if it's a high-privileged account.
6. Lastly, record details of the incident (user, breach source, etc) in a log or ticket for auditing. Track that the user updated their password if your systems report it.

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Immediate Value

This workflow tackles one of the biggest hidden risks. In practice, compromised passwords are extremely common: one analysis found that over 50% of authentication requests contained credentials known from breaches. Blink leverages the same breach data proactively: accounts with exposed or reused passwords are immediately flagged for action. This turns compromised credentials from a passive threat into a trigger for automatic response, dramatically reducing the attacker’s window of opportunity. Even seemingly low-risk accounts are flagged quickly, reducing the chance that stolen credentials can be reused across systems.

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Automating password hygiene processes like these turns manual best-practice checks into continuous enforcement. Instead of hoping policies are followed, Blink makes them self-operational. Continuous enforcement dramatically improves security posture. For context, IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report notes the average breach now costs about $4.88 million.

Preventing even one breach through better password controls can justify the investment in automation. In effect, you automate the mundane but important parts of security, so the team can focus on more strategic work. This level of automation and visibility means improved compliance, fewer oversights, and a much stronger security posture overall. Additionally, because Blink logs every action, teams get a clear audit trail of password policy enforcement and remediation.

On National Password Day and beyond, organizations should remember that passwords alone are not enough without strict enforcement. Blink automations ensure that enforcement processes run 24/7. By implementing workflows that enforce MFA, prompt timely password changes, and flag compromised credentials, security teams can maintain password hygiene at scale. This proactive automation minimizes human error and frees the team to focus on higher-priority threats, greatly strengthening the organization’s overall security posture.

Schedule a demo with Blink Ops and see how automation can improve your security workflows: https://go.blinkops.com/get-started/.