V-258834

Discussion

When operating system accounts are removed, user accessibility is affected. Accounts are utilized for identifying individual users or for identifying the operating system processes themselves. In order to detect and respond to events affecting user accessibility and system processing, operating systems must audit account removal actions and, as required, notify the appropriate individuals so they can investigate the event. Such a capability greatly reduces the risk that operating system accessibility will be negatively affected for extended periods of time and provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following command to verify an audit rule exists to audit account removals:

# auditctl -l | grep -E "(userdel|groupdel)"

Example result:

-w /usr/sbin/userdel -p x -k userdel
-w /usr/sbin/groupdel -p x -k groupdel

If either "userdel" or "groupdel" are not listed with a permissions filter of at least "x", this is a finding.

Note: This check depends on the "auditd" service to be in a running state for accurate results. The "auditd" service is enabled in control PHTN-40-000016.