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V-215377

CAT II (Medium)

The discard daemon must be disabled on AIX.

Rule ID

SV-215377r958478_rule

STIG

IBM AIX 7.x Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V3R2

CCIs

CCI-000381

Discussion

The discard service is used as a debugging and measurement tool. It sets up a listening socket and ignores data that it receives. This is a /dev/null service and is obsolete. This can be used in DoS attacks and therefore, must be disabled to prevent attacks.

Check Content

From the command prompt, execute the following command: 
# grep "^discard[[:blank:]]" /etc/inetd.conf

If there is any output from the command, this is a finding.

Fix Text

In "/etc/inetd.conf", comment out the "discard" entries by running commands: 
# chsubserver -r inetd -C /etc/inetd.conf -d -v 'discard' -p 'tcp' 
# chsubserver -r inetd -C /etc/inetd.conf -d -v 'discard' -p 'udp'

Restart inetd:
# refresh -s inetd