Press "Enter" to skip to content

Restricting Login Usage

Kenneth Fisher shows how to prevent people from using those high-power application accounts:

Anyone of these would cause you to fail a security audit. All of them together? Not good.

So how do we fix it? Well, the best possible method is to not give your developers the password. Use config files containing an encrypted copy of the password and you can dramatically limit knowledge of the password. However, that isn’t necessarily a quick or easy solution (modifying the app to use a config file at all for example). So what to do in the meantime?

The simplest thing to do is to create a logon trigger to control where this account can come from. Before we start if you are going to use a logon trigger make sure you know how to log in and disable it if there are any mistakes.

The logon trigger is hardly perfect, but it does help at the margin.