Orphaned Accounts Are a Growing Security Concern, Study Says

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Orphaned Accounts Are a Growing Security Concern, Study Says

5/22/2008

By Jabulani Leffall

IT auditors examine accounts just like their financial auditing counterparts. Instead of trial balances, they look at system user accounts to determine who signed on when and who did what.

But what about who's logging into what account and when? More important, are these people even around anymore?

These are some of the questions that a new study by security software and consultancy firm Symark International attempts to address. The report, released Monday, revealed that 42 percent of the organizations surveyed have no idea how many orphaned accounts they have. Moreover, more than a quarter of respondents said they don't have a set procedure to locate or turn off orphaned accounts.

According to Symark and IT auditors, accounts that are no longer being used by former employees as well as temporary consultant sign-on accounts, among others, are a growing problem at enterprises large and small.

"We're talking about plumbing here so it's not a sexy thing," said Ellen Libenson, vice president of product management at Symark. "But it's something security, database and system administrators should look at and take very seriously. It's not sexy until something goes wrong."

One need only look at what happened at online mortgage and loan company LendingTree to see a perfect example of how accounts with no corresponding users can cripple an enterprise. According to a letter LendingTree released in April, a few of the company's former employees possibly helped a small number of their mortgage lender friends gain access to the personal information of LendingTree customers. They did this by sharing passwords and accessing different data and proprietary documents between October 2006 and early 2008. The company did not reveal how many individuals were complicit or the number of records affected.

The situation exemplifies something that is endemic in many IT shops where administrators don't have the time to shut off accounts or there's neither proper communication between IT and HR about who's coming and going, nor formal change management procedures in place.

"This issue is pretty common in many places in varying degrees," said Robert Green, a senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT audit practice in Los Angeles. "Another thing that is scary is nameless admin accounts that are set up for development and programming purposes that just tend to sit there. No name is assigned to them so it's a tougher audit trail to traverse and, most of the time, you don't know who logged in when."

In cases like these, an IT auditor doing a security review may check off these orphaned accounts as anything from a minor "exception" in testing to a "significant deficiency," which--in the Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance world--can lead to a material weakness that has to be disclosed to shareholders and the public.