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Service accounts ease the burden on Active Directory (AD) admins by eliminating the need to constantly monitor users entrusted with elevated privileges for running critical applications. Instead, these non-human-controlled service accounts enable applications to access servers, databases, and other resources in the network. However, in environments where there is no established process for the upkeep of service accounts, they become prone to misuse by IT admins and attackers. These seven best practices can help you manage your AD service accounts effectively and avoid critical system failures and downtime in your network.
Keep a record of all the services running in your Windows environment and the computers that are hosting them, along with the associated service accounts. If your IT environment has different services running on multiple machines, a consolidated view will make it easier for you to manage them.
Create service accounts with minimal privileges corresponding to the requirements of the services using them. This ensures that these accounts, if compromised, will not cause much damage to your resources. Generally, privileges such as remote access, network access, and write permissions can be removed for service accounts.
Using a single service account to run multiple services will lead to credential mix up when an IT admin changes its password. This causes all the services using this account to stop working abruptly. To avoid this, maintain dedicated service accounts for every service running in your environment.
Service account credentials are often shared by multiple personnel. That's why these accounts should not be added to privileged groups, as this can allow malicious insiders to leverage the shared credentials to escalate privileges and compromise your network.
Enabling auditing for service accounts lets you track their usage and report on the changes made to them. Auditing service accounts also establishes accountability by allowing your IT admins to review the changes, troubleshoot disruptions, and take action if unauthorized activity is detected.
As many organizations set their service account passwords to never expire, it is important to establish a process to update these passwords periodically. The best way to do this is to allow only the IT admin to reset the service account passwords and restrict others from performing this action.
As software applications in your IT environment get upgraded or replaced, some service accounts may be left unused or orphaned, cluttering your directory. Identifying these service accounts, and disabling or deleting them will ensure hackers don't exploit these accounts to sabotage your network resources.
Using native tools to identify and manage service accounts can be a hectic and time-consuming process. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus is a UBA-driven change auditing tool that offers deep insights into your AD service account activities. ADAudit Plus provides real-time visibility into the services running on your computers along with their associated service accounts, and lets you manage them from a single console.
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