High Global Administrator to privileged user ratio

Overview

When organizations maintain a disproportionately high ratio of Global Administrators relative to their total privileged user population, they expose themselves to significant security risks that threat actors might exploit through various attack vectors. Excessive Global Administrator assignments create multiple high-value targets for threat actors who might leverage initial access through credential compromise, phishing attacks, or insider threats to gain unrestricted access to the entire Microsoft Entra ID tenant and connected Microsoft 365 services.

Remediation

• Minimize the number of Global Administrator role assignments

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	Low
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Identity
Category	Privileged access
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Roles and administrators
Area	Privileged access
ATT&CK	T1078.004 Cloud Accounts, T1098.003 Additional Cloud Roles
Licence	Free
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.