What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on 8.2.2 Shared and generic IDs only by exception?

Register of shared, group and generic accounts with business justification and management approval; Password vault checkout logs tying each use of a shared account to a named individual; Break-glass procedure and records of each emergency use with duration; Account configuration showing shared IDs disabled or locked outside approved use.

What is the most common gap auditors find on 8.2.2?

Root or built-in administrator password known by the whole team and used routinely

PCI DSS v4.0.1 · Req 8: Identify and Authenticate Users

`8.2.2` Shared and generic IDs only by exception

Group, shared or generic IDs, and any other shared authentication credentials, may be used only where needed as an exception, and must be managed so that: use of the ID is blocked unless an exceptional circumstance calls for it; use lasts only as long as the exceptional circumstance requires; a business justification is documented; management explicitly approves the use; the identity of the individual is verified before the account is made available; and every action taken is attributable to one individual user. The guidance suggests password vaults or controls like sudo, and gives a break-glass emergency account as an example of an exception. Applicability: not intended for point-of-sale terminal user accounts that are limited to a single card number per transaction. Objective under the customized approach: all actions carried out with group, shared or generic IDs can be attributed to an individual person.

Source: PCI DSS v4.0.1, 8.2.2. 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 PCI DSS v4.0.1 in the compliance library.

Version 4.0.1 is the active version; 4.0 has been retired. Appendix A1 applies only to multi-tenant service providers, A2 only to card-present POS POI terminals that still use SSL or early TLS, and A3 only when a payment brand or acquirer requires it. Which requirements apply to you follows your validation type.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

easy

to go live

Identity provider / directory

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

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

Register of shared, group and generic accounts with business justification and management approval · Identity provider / directory
Password vault checkout logs tying each use of a shared account to a named individual · Identity provider / directory
Account configuration showing shared IDs disabled or locked outside approved use · Identity provider / directory

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Break-glass procedure and records of each emergency use with duration · Identity provider / directory

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

none for this control

First move

Automate the pull from your Identity provider / directory. Scheduled export of users, roles and MFA state from the directory; access-review completion pulled from the IdP, not a spreadsheet.

Common gaps auditors find

Root or built-in administrator password known by the whole team and used routinely
No record of who used a shared account at a given time
Shared account kept permanently enabled rather than for the duration of the exception
Justification documented but no explicit management approval

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 sheet

8.2.1 Unique ID assigned to every user · 8.2.3 Service provider unique factors per customer