GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Question
Your organization uses a shared "dev-tools" project where several teams previously launched Compute Engine instances with the project's default service account. A recent audit shows the default service account is no longer attached to any running VM instances, but you are unsure whether some forgotten scripts or instance templates might still depend on it. As the security engineer, what action best reduces the risk of the account's broad permissions while still allowing you to recover quickly if an undiscovered dependency surfaces?
Permanently delete the default service account after exporting any user-managed keys, then recreate it if failures occur.
Disable the default service account while leaving its existing IAM role bindings intact so you can quickly re-enable it if a hidden dependency appears.
Leave the account active and grant project editors the Service Account Admin role so they can fix issues if something breaks.
Keep the service account enabled but rotate any user-managed keys monthly and rely on audit logs to detect misuse.
Google's best practice is to disable an unused default service account instead of deleting it. Disabling immediately blocks the account from obtaining new OAuth tokens and from creating or using service-account keys, eliminating the risk that its typically broad permissions could be misused. Because disabling does not remove the service account's IAM role bindings, you can re-enable the same identity instantly if you later find that an automated process still needs it, restoring any previous access without recreating roles or redeploying code. Permanently deleting the account would start a 30-day grace period after which the identity is gone and any lingering dependencies would fail; rotating keys or merely adding roles leaves the powerful account active; delegating extra privileges to project editors does nothing to mitigate the account's standing risk.
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