RE: Restrict the Domain Admin

["Craig Wright" <cwright () bdosyd com au>]

Everything is always a matter of technical and procedural. The next
question is which domain privileges do you need, first and foremost the
controls over the logging and audit trails should not be vested in a
complete admin. Give one set of rights to internal audit and another to
the general admin as an example.

The default admin account gets -
1       logged extensively
2       split - i.e. have half the password entered by manager 1 and the
other half by manager 2 or setup a token based auth and lock the token
in a safe - there are many ways to do this and technology is not always
the best answer.

Have a change process to get access to the domain admin account on the
few rare occasions where you need full access.

Set the admin accounts that you create to have no rights to change audit
for one account and no rights to do anything other than audit for the
other (and this than goes to internal audit). 

Craig 

-----Original Message-----
From: Depp, Dennis M. [mailto:deppdm () ornl gov] 
Sent: 23 September 2005 1:41
To: Craig Wright; cc; security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: RE: Restrict the Domain Admin

Hey Craig, 

Aren't these proceedural controls and not technical?  Were you able to
use Domain admin privs without these controls, or did this process
somehow grant you domain admin access.  I suspect it is the former and
not the latter.  Somebody has to be the holder of the keys, i.e. the
Domain Admin password.  If that is not you, then someone else must have
had this password and given it to you when you needed it.  If you
already had the rights, then you could have used these privs with out
signing the proper paperwork.  True you can have auditing turned on to
determine when someone uses their domain credentials, but this would
only identify the credentials were used and not stop them from using
them.

Dennis 

-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Wright [mailto:cwright () bdosyd com au]
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 5:47 PM
To: cc; security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: RE: Restrict the Domain Admin

Have we heard of segregation of duties?

I am sorry but I have NEVER seen a site with more than 1 IT person where
domain admins are needed for all tasks. It is not about whether you
trust the person - minimise the exposure. The trust argument is just a
waste of time.

Even when I was an admin - I always made sure that I did not have
complete control without going through a change process where everything
is logged and checked - just to cover my own ass if something happened

Craig

PS
Lets hope that you never have me doing a SOX, SAS70 or other audit of
your site

-----Original Message-----
From: cc [mailto:cc () belfordhk com]
Sent: 20 September 2005 4:56
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Restrict the Domain Admin

sf_mail_sbm () yahoo com sighed and wrote::

> Hi List,
> Is there a way to restrict access of a Domain Admin?

Here's my $0.02.

By restricting the access of a domain admin, you've already defeated the
purpose of a domain admin.  The main point of the matter is that in
order for one person to be a domain admin, you must have extraordinary
(or maybe just special) trust in both the person's ability and their
standards of
operating procedures.   By restricting access to the domain
admin, you are in essence saying, "Here's the domain access, but we
don't trust you enough to give you the full 9 yards so we're restricting
your access to these privileges."

If you don't have 100% confidence in either the person's ability or
their ethics, you really shouldn't be giving the person that much access
to begin with.

As some other poster (Mr. Armfield) mentioned here, eventually you'll
need a person who has access to the whole nine yards.