Re: software to control domain administrators

[Charles Fraser <fraserc () mail montclair edu>]

"If I can't trust my admin he/she shouldn't be one" is an archaic school 
of thought. In today's age of compliance and accountability that school 
of thought needs to be radically changed. There needs to be checks and 
balances. Which is why security has to be separate from operations. More 
and more enterprises are following the new school of thought that an 
employee has the computer access and permissions that it takes for he or 
she to perform their functions no more no less. Full domain and 
enterprise administrators are less and less common in favor of dividing 
responsibility so administrators can have less rights to perform their 
day to day functions. Windows offers runas and sudo capabilities which 
we utilize to reduce the number of people who require administrative 
access.  I advocate a central/separate syslog/event viewer server that 
is not in the domain and the administrators have no access to 
whatsoever. Now if someone is trying to cover their tracks they can't 
because the logs are duplicated in real time to the central server. It 
should be stressed it is not a matter of trust but a matter of checks 
and balances.


Charlie

LordInfidel () directionweb com wrote:

> One of my co-workers pointed out that my response may of have come off
> the wrong way...
>
> First, Always **Audit Everything**......  I was not advocating 'not
> auditing'.
>
> Trustworthy Admins already do this with the explicit knowledge that they
> themselves are subject to being audited and that their actions on the
> network will be logged.  The point I was attempting to make before is
> that a malicious admin or one that feels threatened has the power to
> reverse that auditing, which the auditing mechanism should reflect
> anyways. But the problem is compounded if the admin has access to the
> logs, then there is nothing stopping them from covering their tracks.
>
> I apologize if it confused anyone.   The overall theme remains the same,
> if you can't explicitly trust the people who are running your network
> then they should not be running it.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: LordInfidel () directionweb com [mailto:LordInfidel () directionweb com]
>
> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 6:02 PM
> To: Diego Teijeiro Ruiz; security-basics () securityfocus com
> Subject: RE: software to control domain administrators
>
> Probably a little late, been busy, but I did not see a response yet to
> this.
>
> (assuming we are talking about NT/AD Domain Admins)
>
> Honestly, if you are looking for something to audit domain admins, then
> you have bigger problems.
>
> Domain admins by the very nature of the account type, have complete
> control over the domain, second to only enterprise admins.   Nothing you
> install or do will prevent them from removing or modifying it.  Even
> restricting them via NTFS permissions or GPO's does nothing since they
> can just take ownership and modify the permissions.
>
> Keep in mind that spying on a domain admin can have catastrophic effects
> if they feel threatened by it since they can easily mess up an entire
> network.
>
> Basically, If you can not trust your domain admin(s), then they should
> probably not be a domain admin and removed from that position of trust.
>
> JMO
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Diego Teijeiro Ruiz [mailto:dteijeiro () azertia com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:51 AM
> To: security-basics () securityfocus com
> Subject: software to control domain administrators
>
>
> Does anyone know any software to control, audit, or restrict access or
> privileges to domain administrators. 
>
> thnx in advance
>
>
> DTR
>
>
>
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