Is there a way to set access to WMI using GroupPolicy?
Made some research on this and looks like the method below should work:
For Windows 2003 with Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), perform the following steps:
- Navigate to
Start Menu
>Administrative Tools
>Group Policy Management
. - In the left-hand pane, navigate to Forest:
Domain Name
->Domains
->Domain Name
, where Domain Name is the name of the domain you wish to modify. - Right-click on
Domain Name
in the left-hand pane and selectCreate and Link a GPO Here
. - Name the new policy
WMI Permissions
.
NOTE: Since WMI must establish a DCOM connection to remote host, this is enough to configure access permissions for DCOM.
Configuring Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) Permissions:
- Navigate to the
WMI Permissions
group policy, either bythe Group Policy Management
plug-in or by theADUC
plug-in. - Ensure that the
WMI Permissions
policy is highlighted and click on theEdit
button. - Navigate to
Computer Configuration
->Windows Settings
->Security Settings
->Local Policies
->Security Options
. - In the right-hand UI pane, double-click on
DCOM: Machine Access Restrictions in Security Descriptor Definition Language (SDDL) syntax
. - Put a checkmark in the box beside
Define this policy setting
. - Click on the
Edit Security
button. - Click on the
Add
button; in the resulting pop-up window, specify the domain administrator account that will be used. - Click OK.
- In the
Group or user names
field, select the domain administrator you specified in step #7. - In the
Permissions for Administrators
field, ensure that there is a checkmark in theAllow
column for theRemote Access
option. - Click OK.
- Click OK.
- In the right-hand UI pane, double-click on
DCOM: Machine Launch Restrictions in Security Descriptor Definition Language (SDDL) syntax
. - Put a checkmark in the box beside
Define this policy setting
. - Click on the
Edit Security
button. - Click on the
Add
button; in the resulting pop-up window, specify the domain administrator account that will be used. - Click OK.
- In the Group or user names field, select the domain administrator you specified in step #16.
- In the
Permissions for Administrators
field, ensure that there is a checkmark under theAllow
column for bothRemote Launch
andRemote Activation
. - Click OK.
- Click OK.
- Close the
Group Policy Object Editor
window. - Click OK and close the
Active Directory Users and Computers
window.
Referencing https://answers.splunk.com/answers/2703/how-to-enable-wmi-data-collection-on-a-domain-server.html
There's no non-esoteric way at this time to globally configure WMI security settings domain-wide. Each machine has its own setting. There is an MSDN blog, however, that lists the steps you can take to create a script that contains the appropriate security descriptors, which you can then subsequently throw into a GPO as a startup script and have your computers get the updated security settings at boot time.
Here's the link to the blog post w/ method for the creating a script: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/spatdsg/2007/11/21/set-wmi-namespace-security-via-gpo-script/
This approach gave me a usable method to enable WMI access for a non-Domain Admin service account using GPO.