I’m in the process of whittling down the accounts that are being created automatically during a system installation. This is for compliance reasons mostly, auditors want to see justification for every account that exists on the system. The system is a fairly basic install with ntp & named added. Here are the accounts I feel safe deleting to start with:
games
uucp
ftp
wwwrun
news
Are there any good reasons to not delete them? What other accounts are safe to delete?
And, interestingly enough the init script I wrote to delete these users seems to have run correctly, but the accounts were still there. I deleted them by hand and they did not reappear. Odd. Any ideas?
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Good reasons to NOT delete them:
They do nothing unless they are being used. Most of these are service
accounts and, as such, have no passwords. The potential risk to
security, then, is pretty close to zero (it’s hard to use an account for
which there is no login). The only non-authentication way to get into
these accounts is from the root user using ‘su’ or equivalent, but
that’s hardly a problem.
Good luck.
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