SQL Security

[jhadur]

We are looking to secure our databases internally. We are running SQL 2000 on Terminal Server 2003.

I found the following in SQL documentation and want to make sure I am understanding this correctly.

Here is the info.

With EFS, database files are encrypted under the identity of the account running SQL Server. Only this account can decrypt the files. If you need to change the account that runs SQL Server, you should first decrypt the files under the old account, then re-encrypt them under the new account.

So does this mean that if I encrypt our database files with EFS and someone makes a copy of the database files they will not be able to decrypt the files because they are not members of the account that originally encrypted the files?

If that is true then - the account we have running SQL Server is the local system. Should I change that to a specific account before I encrypt the files or is it safe from general users being run as the local system account?

[zeedo]

It should probably be running as a user other thank LS anyway.

Check out this guide for basic SQL security:
http://www.nsa.gov/snac/db/mssql_2k.pdf