5.5 Establish and Maintain an Inventory of Service Accounts
Keep an inventory of service accounts that records at least the owning department, review date and purpose, and confirm at least quarterly that every active service account is authorised. Implementation Groups: IG2 and IG3 (not in the IG1 baseline; applies from IG2 upward). Asset type: Users. Security function: Identify.
Source: CIS Controls v8.1, 5.5. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open CIS Controls v8.1 in the compliance library.
Each safeguard shows its Implementation Groups. IG1 is the essential baseline for every enterprise, IG2 adds to it, IG3 is all 153. Version 8.1 adds the Govern security function and asks for more processes to be documented; numbering is unchanged from v8.
These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.
system holds itEvidence a system already holds
- Service account register with owner, purpose and last review date · Identity provider / directory
periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review
- Quarterly review sign-offs · Document repository
- Evidence of removal for unneeded service accounts · Identity provider / directory
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
none for this control
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- Service accounts with no known owner
- Passwords never rotated
- Cloud workload identities not included
Do this for your whole sheet
Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.
Build my evidence sheet5.4 Restrict Administrator Privileges to Dedicated Administrator Accounts · 5.6 Centralize Account Management