Generic Users

[Russell.Butturini at Healthways.com (Butturini, Russell)]

If memory serves, SOX/J-SOX forbid the use of generic accounts. I don't think they're the worst thing in the world 
personally if they're only being used to gain access to a machine and then there's a secondary layer of authentication 
to the applications, but I'm not an auditor either.

________________________________
From: pauldotcom-bounces at mail.pauldotcom.com <pauldotcom-bounces at mail.pauldotcom.com>
To: PaulDotCom Security Weekly Mailing List <pauldotcom at mail.pauldotcom.com>
Sent: Sat Jun 05 23:58:16 2010
Subject: Re: [Pauldotcom] Generic Users

Did they give a reason why a generic account is a bad thing?  Personally, my biggest issue with those is 
accountability.  Who is actually using those generic account?  Those are typically shared accounts by different admins 
from my experience.  Also, how do you keep control over who knows the password to those accounts?

Some software, like SAP, force you to use generic accounts.  In those cases, you should not make those accounts 
accessible over the network.  Instead (this works for UNIX environments, have your users logon to the server and then 
su/sudo to that account.  That leaves an audit trail.




On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Vincent Lape <vlape at me.com<mailto:vlape at me.com>> wrote:
Depending on the audit you can file a compensating control if the
account uses a secure means of login. (such as ssh) and restrict where
the accounts can login from and what commands the account can run.
Without giving too much info what are these generic accounts used for?



On Jun 4, 2010, at 1:59 AM, Cezar Spatariu Neagu <cezar.spatariu at gmail.com<mailto:cezar.spatariu at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I would like to ask you all about some "best practices" regarding
> generic users. I had an internal audit that point out that i do use
> generic users.
> My solution before this was to create many of them with very few
> rights.
> And I have some that I use in configuration files and I can not change
> the password.
> How shall I treat this issue?
>
> Thank you for the your inputs.
>
> Cezar Spatariu
>
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