Planning Distributed Security
Planning Distributed Security |
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Some of the policies in your security plan will involve the daily duties of your IT department staff. Windows 2000 supports delegation of administrative permissions, allowing specific personnel limited rights to administer their own groups and files. Windows 2000 also supports audit logs of system activity, with a fine degree of granularity about which types of events will be logged and in what context.
It is also extremely important that your plan describes how you intend to protect your domain administrator accounts from penetration by an intruder. It is recommended that you set up your domain account policies to require all accounts to use a long and complex password that cannot be easily cracked. This is common sense but it needs to be explicitly stated in your plan.
It is not as obvious that security will be compromised if too many people know the administrator password. The administrator of the root domain of a domain tree is also automatically a member of the Schema Administrators group and the Enterprise Administrators group. This is a highly privileged account where an intruder can do unlimited damage. Your plan needs to state that access to this account is limited to a very small number of trusted personnel.
The domain administrator account must be used only for tasks that require administrator privileges. It must never be left logged on and unattended. Encourage your administrator staff to use a second, unprivileged account for nonadministrative activities (reading e-mail, Web browsing, and so on).
Server consoles used for domain administration must be physically secured so that only authorized personnel have access to them. Your security plan needs to state this and list the personnel who might use the consoles. It is not as obvious that users of the Administrator account must never log on to client computers managed by someone who is not equally trusted. The other client computer administrator might introduce other code on that computer that will unknowingly exploit the administrator privileges.