More Info:

The remote access option controls the execution of stored procedures from local or remote servers on which instances of SQL Server are running. This default value for this option is 1. This grants permission to run local stored procedures from remote servers or remote stored procedures from the local server. To prevent local stored procedures from being run from a remote server or remote stored procedures from being run on the local server, this must be disabled. The Remote Access option controls the execution of local stored procedures on remote servers or remote stored procedures on local server. ‘Remote access’ functionality can be abused to launch a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack on remote servers by off-loading query processing to a target, hence this should be disabled. This recommendation is applicable to SQL Server database instances.

Risk Level

Low

Address

Reliability, Security

Compliance Standards

CISGCP, CBP

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

To remediate the “SQL Server Remove Access Flag Should Be Off” misconfiguration for GCP using the GCP console, you can follow these steps:

  1. Log in to the GCP console and select the project that contains the SQL Server instance.

  2. Navigate to the Cloud SQL instances page and select the instance that you want to remediate.

  3. Click on the “Edit” button to edit the instance configuration.

  4. Scroll down to the “Authorization” section and ensure that the “Allow only SSL connections” option is selected.

  5. Under the “Authorized networks” section, ensure that only the necessary IP addresses or ranges are listed.

  6. Scroll down to the “Flags” section and ensure that the “remove_access_flag” option is set to “off”.

  7. Click on the “Save” button to save the changes.

  8. Verify that the misconfiguration has been remediated by running a vulnerability scan or security audit on the SQL Server instance.

By following these steps, you can remediate the “SQL Server Remove Access Flag Should Be Off” misconfiguration for GCP using the GCP console.

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