All enterprise applications have owners

Overview

Without owners, enterprise applications become orphaned assets that threat actors can exploit through credential harvesting and privilege escalation techniques. These applications often retain elevated permissions and access to sensitive resources while lacking proper oversight and security governance. The elevation of privilege to owners can raise a security concern, depending on the application’s permissions. More critically, applications without an owner can create uncertainty in security monitoring where threat actors can establish persistence by using existing application permissions to access data or create backdoor accounts without triggering ownership-based detection mechanisms.

When applications lack owners, security teams can’t effectively conduct application lifecycle management. This gap leaves applications with potentially excessive permissions, outdated configurations, or compromised credentials that threat actors can discover through enumeration techniques and exploit to move laterally within the environment. The absence of ownership also prevents proper access reviews and permission audits, allowing threat actors to maintain long-term access through applications that should be decommissioned or had their permissions reduced. Not maintaining a clean application portfolio can provide persistent access vectors that can be used for data exfiltration or further compromise of the environment.

Remediation

• Assign owners to applications

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	Medium
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Identity
Category	Access control
Product	Entra ID
Feature	Applications
Area	Applications and workload identities
ATT&CK	T1098.001 Additional Cloud Credentials, T1078.004 Cloud Accounts
Licence	P1
Tenant	Workforce, External

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.