Use of DBA accounts should be restricted to administrative activities.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-15632	DG0124-SQLServer9	SV-24312r1_rule	ECLP-1	Medium

Description
Use of privileged accounts for non-administrative purposes puts data at risk of unintended or unauthorized loss, modification or exposure. In particular, DBA accounts if used for non-administration application development or application maintenance can lead to miss-assignment of privileges where privileges are inherited by object owners. It may also lead to loss or compromise of application data where the elevated privileges bypass controls designed in and provided by applications.

Description

Use of privileged accounts for non-administrative purposes puts data at risk of unintended or unauthorized loss, modification or exposure. In particular, DBA accounts if used for non-administration application development or application maintenance can lead to miss-assignment of privileges where privileges are inherited by object owners. It may also lead to loss or compromise of application data where the elevated privileges bypass controls designed in and provided by applications.

STIG	Date
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Instance Security Technical Implementation Guide	2015-06-16

Details

Check Text ( C-23586r1_chk )
Review accounts assigned fixed server roles and fixed database roles with the DBA/IAO and as documented in the System Security Plan. Review other database or application roles assigned to the accounts assigned fixed roles as documented in the System Security Plan. If any accounts assigned fixed roles are also assigned application roles or other application object privilege roles or own application objects used for other than DBA functions, this is a Finding.

Check Text ( C-23586r1_chk )

Review accounts assigned fixed server roles and fixed database roles with the DBA/IAO and as documented in the System Security Plan.

Review other database or application roles assigned to the accounts assigned fixed roles as documented in the System Security Plan.

If any accounts assigned fixed roles are also assigned application roles or other application object privilege roles or own application objects used for other than DBA functions, this is a Finding.

Fix Text (F-20455r1_fix)
Create separate accounts for administration activities. Develop, document and implement policy and procedures that require separate, unprivileged or less-privileged accounts for development, testing and application users.