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V-258843

CAT II (Medium)

The Photon operating system must automatically lock an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts in 15 minutes occur.

Rule ID

SV-258843r933590_rule

STIG

VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS 4.0 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V1R1

CCIs

CCI-002238

Discussion

By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following commands to verify accounts are locked until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts in 15 minutes are made:

# grep '^unlock_time =' /etc/security/faillock.conf

Example result:

unlock_time = 0

If the "unlock_time" option is not set to "0", is missing or commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Navigate to and open:

/etc/security/faillock.conf

Add or update the following lines:

unlock_time = 0

Note: On vCenter appliances, the equivalent file must be edited under "/etc/applmgmt/appliance", if one exists, for the changes to persist after a reboot.