June 18, 2010 at 3:46 am
Hello,
I have come across several cases where the SQL services are running under the local or domain administrator account. I know its better to have a user account do this, but I wondering why its even worse to use the . beforehand, as in
.\Administrator
Just curious.
Thanks
D.
June 18, 2010 at 4:07 am
My take is that it's about least privilege- local system and domain admin are high level accounts that have rights beyond a standard AD account.
If you have a vulnerability in SQL Server, you want the damage to be contained to SQL Server- rather than being able to damage the operating system/network as well.
It gets even more secure when the account only has rights to certain folders or files, and certain policies (rather than being a local administrator).
The other factor is that service accounts will lock out after a few attempts (depending on the AD policy), whereas domain admin won't lock out (I'm guessing) and a hacker can try unlimited attempts until the password is cracked.
these are just my thoughts however...
June 18, 2010 at 6:41 am
.\administrator is the same as hostname\administrator. '.' just means "local host". I would not say .\administrator is any worse than using hostname\administrator.
maybe what you mean is why is using "administrator" worse than using some other local account with admin access. In that case, administrator is a well known account, therefore a hacker might assume that account has sysadmin and therefore is more likely to attempt to hack using that account than some other admin account- say hostname\alocaladminaccount.
Either way, you're right- don't using a local admin account- using an account with only the minimum required privileges required by SQL Server is the best practice.
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