Lock Emergency Accounts after 72 Hours Emergency administrator accounts are privileged accounts which are established in response to crisis situations where the need for rapid account activation is required. Therefore, emergency account activation may bypass normal account authorization processes. If these accounts are automatically disabled, system maintenance during emergencies may not be possible, thus adversely affecting system availability. Emergency administrator accounts are different from infrequently used accounts (i.e., local login accounts used by system administrators when network or normal logon/access is not available). Infrequently used accounts also remain available and are not subject to automatic termination dates. However, an emergency administrator account is normally a different account which is created for use by vendors or system maintainers. To address access requirements, many operating systems can be integrated with enterprise-level authentication/access mechanisms that meet or exceed access control policy requirements.

[Enable/Disable, Expire_Date_GMT in mm/dd/yy, (72 Hours) in Minutes]

If an emergency account has been created on the workstation, you can check the expiration settings using the following command: sudo pwpolicy -u username get-effective-policy | tr ' ' ' ' | grep 'usingHardExpirationDate|hardExpireDateGMT' The value of 'usingHardExpirationDate' should be '1', and the value for the 'hardExpireDateGMT' should be a valid date. Alternately, you can check if the account has been set to automatically expire after 72 hours using the following command: sudo pwpolicy -u username get-effective-policy | tr ' ' ' ' | grep 'maxMinutesUntilDisabled' The value of 'maxMinutesUntilDisabled' should be 4320. If no expiration date is set, or if the account has not been configured to be automatically disabled after 72 hours, and password policy is not controlled by a directory server, this is a finding.