GTRADE-004: Super-Admin Sprawl
- Platform
- Google Workspace
- Category
- Adversary Tradecraft
- Severity
- Medium
- Zero Trust pillar
- Visibility & Analytics (weight 1)
- Golden fixtures
- 3
- Branch coverage
- Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
- Provenance
- original
What it checks
Super administrators bypass SSO and most controls; a large super-admin population expands the org's highest-value attack surface. Google best practice is to keep the count small (fewer than five) with day-to-day work done under least-privilege roles.
Recommended value
Fewer than 5 active super administrators
Remediation
Account > Admin roles > Super Admin: reduce membership to the minimum break-glass set; move routine duties to least-privilege custom/prebuilt roles; enforce phishing-resistant 2SV on all remaining super admins.
Fixture-proven verdicts
Every verdict below is proven by a golden fixture in the module's gating test suite. This table derives from the last green run; it cannot be edited by hand.
| Scenario | Expected verdict |
|---|---|
| clean | PASS |
| known-bad | FAIL |
| throttled | Not Assessed |
Framework mappings
- NIST SP 800-53
- AC-6, AC-6(5)
- CIS Benchmark
- 1.x
- MITRE ATT&CK
- T1078.004