Overview

Enabling Ad Hoc Distributed Queries allows users to query data and execute statements on external data sources. This functionality should be disabled.

This feature can be used to remotely access and exploit vulnerabilities on remote SQL Server instances and to run unsafe Visual Basic for Application functions.

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Benchmarks

This control is used in the following benchmarks:

Skipping

To deliberately skip this control (e.g. meaning don’t use Puppet to enforce this setting), we provide you with three ways:

1) Add mssql_secured::controls::ad_hoc_distributed_queries_server_configuration_option_is_set_to_0: skip to your hiera data. This will skip this control for ALL databases.
2) Add mssql_secured::controls::ad_hoc_distributed_queries_server_configuration_option_is_set_to_0::dbname: skip to your hiera data. This will skip this control for specified database only.
3) Add an entry with the content ad_hoc_distributed_queries_server_configuration_option_is_set_to_0 to the array value mssql_secured::skip_list in your hiera data.

Attributes

Attribute Name Short Description
title The database to apply the control to.

title

The database to apply the control to.

All controls need an database to apply the control to. Here is a simple example:

mssql_secured::controls::control_name {'MSSQLSERVER':}

In this example, the string DB is the database to apply the control to.

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