| When application accounts are disabled, user accessibility is affected. Accounts are utilized for identifying individual application users or for identifying the application processes themselves.
In order to detect and respond to events that affect user accessibility and application processing, applications must audit account disabling actions and, as required, notify the appropriate individuals so they can investigate the event. Such a capability greatly reduces the risk that application accessibility will be negatively affected for extended periods of time and also provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes.
Note that user authentication and account management must be done via an enterprise-wide mechanism whenever possible. Examples of enterprise-level authentication/access mechanisms include, but are not limited to, Active Directory and LDAP. This requirement applies to cases where it is necessary to have accounts directly managed by Oracle.
However, notwithstanding how accounts are managed, the DBMS must support the requirement to notify appropriate individuals upon the disabling of an account. Indeed, in a configuration where accounts are normally managed externally, the manipulation of an Oracle account may indicate hostile activity. |
