SID

Due to a lack of visibility permission cleanup is performed far less frequently than it could, and probably should. As a result, ghost ACEs (permissions from deleted accounts) linger in the dark corners of the file system, threatening the unsuspecting admin with the horrors of unresolvable SIDs.

Updated: 2021-06-22 Every object that can have a security descriptor (SD) is a securable object that may be protected by permissions. All named and several unnamed Windows objects are securable and can have SDs, although this is not widely known. There does not even exist a GUI for manipulating the SDs of many object types! Have you ever tried to kill a system process in Task Manager and got the message “Access denied”? This is due to the fact that this process’ SD does not allow even administrators to kill the process. But it is, of course, possible, as an administrator, to obtain the necessary permissions, provided a GUI or some other tool is available.