Hi Rob,
in my experience a best practice is to grant your desktop support
people the necessary admin rights on the workstations, then they can
log in the boxes to work with their own credentials (as long as the
computer can get to the DC for authentication purposes)
The local admin account poses a high risk in terms of workstations
administration: you will never be completely sure about what's
installed on the computers or which services are running or not (like
removing an antivirus through the registry) That's something users
can't do without admin rights.
On the other hand it brings to the table an important increase on the
required administrative workforce (that can be mitigated with the
right tools anyway)
Compromise is a big arena: anybody can compromise a box by exploiting
a service running like system and they will have admin rights in a
very stealth way (That's why is utterly important to have a good
patching policy/process)
Also, unless you are concentrating users logs somewhere, this is not a
reliable option to investigate security breaches. May help, but it's
not reliable.
I may be missing something, so feel free to moan. :)
C.
On Jan 13, 2008 7:19 PM, Rob Thompson <my.security.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
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Dear List,
I am looking for a general consensus from my peers. If you are able to
answer this with definite knowledge and not an assumption and you fully
understand what you are saying, please reply to this message. I do not
mean to be rude, but if you are not sure, please do not respond to this
message.
I am asking this as I will be presenting this to a company, as they have
proposed this idea and I want to show them exactly what they are
considering getting themselves into.
What is your professional opinion on removing the local administrator
account?
Does this pose a security risk to have a local administrator account on
a computer, so that IT staff (which are the only people in the
organization that are entitled to this user/pass) can do work on a
computer in a way that can not be "securely" audited? What I mean by
this is, they all use this one account (for emergencies only), instead
of using their own credentials over the network - thereby showing the
local admin account was used, but not who used it.
What are the risks involved in removing this account?
Is this a general best practice, from a security point of view?
If not, what is the best practice from a security point of view?
Lastly, do you believe or not, that if the IT staff wanted to compromise
a box, anonymously, would they really need this local administrator
account on the box? Or would they still be able to do this, without the
account there? Why?
I sincerely appreciate your time and thank you in advance for any
answers that you may pose. Also, if you see something that I did not
consider in my questions, please feel free to include that as well.
Please remember, if you think that this is a wise decision or not,
PLEASE state your answers and why.
- --
Rob
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