V-222415

Discussion

When application accounts are disabled, user accessibility is affected. Accounts are utilized for identifying individual application users or for identifying the application processes themselves. In order to detect and respond to events affecting user accessibility and application processing, applications must audit account disabling actions and, as required, notify the appropriate individuals, so they can investigate the event. Such a capability greatly reduces the risk that application accessibility will be negatively affected for extended periods of time and provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes. Application developers are encouraged to integrate their applications with enterprise-level authentication/access/audit mechanisms such as Syslog, Active Directory or LDAP.

Check Content

Examine the application documentation to identify how the application users are managed.

Interview the application administrator and determine if the application is configured to utilize a centralized user management system like Active Directory for user management or if the application manages user accounts within the application.

If the application is configured to use an enterprise-based application user management capability that is STIG compliant, the requirement is not applicable.

Identify the location of the audit logs and review the end of the logs.

Access the user account management functionality and disable a test user account.

Examine the log file again and determine if the account disable event was logged. The information logged should, at a minimum, include enough detail to determine which account was disabled and when.

If the account disabling event information was not logged, this is a finding.