The point: Password and MFA strategies are core elements of NIS2 compliance and require clear policies, technical implementation, and regular review.
The NIS2 Directive requires companies in the EU to adhere to stricter cybersecurity standards. A central pillar of this is the correct implementation of password policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
The Network and Information Security Directive 2 (NIS2) establishes binding minimum cybersecurity requirements in the EU. For the target groups of critical infrastructure and large enterprises, secure authentication mechanisms are non-negotiable—particularly at management level and for privileged accounts.
With passwords, this concretely means: organizations must establish policies that enforce strong, complex passwords, prevent their reuse, and provide for regular changes. Equally important is secure storage through hashing and salting. For a CISO, the implementation of a comprehensive password policy is a baseline control mechanism that should be enforced through an Identity and Access Management system (IAM).
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not optional under NIS2, but rather a protective measure that becomes mandatory particularly for administrative access, VPN connections, and cloud-based applications. The range extends from SMS-based procedures to time-based authentication apps to hardware keys—the latter offering the highest level of security and being more resistant to phishing attacks.
In practice, compliance also requires regular auditing of these controls: How often are weak passwords actually changed? Which user groups have not yet migrated to MFA? Which fallback mechanisms are documented? A CISO should not only anchor this implementation technically, but also embed it in a governance structure—including training, incident response, and regular security assessment.
Source: news.google.com · Published July 6, 2026
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