Ensure Audit Success and Failure for 'Audit Policy: Account Management: User Account Management' This subcategory reports each event of user account management, such as when a user account is created, changed, or deleted; a user account is renamed, disabled, or enabled; or a password is set or changed. If you enable this Audit policy setting, administrators can track events to detect malicious, accidental, and authorized creation of user accounts. Note: This setting also audits queries as well as user account changes. Events for this subcategory include: - 4720: A user account was created. - 4722: A user account was enabled. - 4723: An attempt was made to change an account's password. - 4724: An attempt was made to reset an account's password. - 4725: A user account was disabled. - 4726: A user account was deleted. - 4738: A user account was changed. - 4740: A user account was locked out. - 4765: SID History was added to an account. - 4766: An attempt to add SID History to an account failed. - 4767: A user account was unlocked. - 4780: The ACL was set on accounts which are members of administrators groups. - 4781: The name of an account was changed: - 4794: An attempt was made to set the Directory Services Restore Mode. - 5376: Credential Manager credentials were backed up. - 5377: Credential Manager credentials were restored from a backup. Refer to the Microsoft Knowledgebase article 'Description of security events in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008' for the most recent information about this setting: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947226. Counter Measure: Enable Audit policy settings that support the organizational security policy for all the computers in your organization. Identify the components that you need for an audit policy that enables your organization to hold users accountable for their actions while using organizational resources and enables IT departments to detect unauthorized activity efficiently and then track those events in log files. Potential Impact: If no audit settings are configured, or if audit settings are too lax on the computers in your organization, security incidents might not be detected or not enough evidence will be available for network forensic analysis after security incidents occur. However, if audit settings are too severe, critically important entries in the Security log may be obscured by all of the meaningless entries and computer performance and the available amount of data storage may be seriously affected. Companies that operate in certain regulated industries may have legal obligations to log certain events or activities.

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(1) GPO: Computer ConfigurationWindows SettingsSecurity SettingsAdvanced Audit Policy ConfigurationAudit PoliciesAccount ManagementAudit Policy: Account Management: User Account Management