V-258801

Discussion

Once an attacker establishes access to a system, the attacker often attempts to create a persistent method of reestablishing access. One way to accomplish this is for the attacker to create an account. Auditing account creation actions provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000004-GPOS-00004, SRG-OS-000476-GPOS-00221

Check Content

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

# auditctl -l | grep -E "(useradd|groupadd)"

Example result:

-w /usr/sbin/useradd -p x -k useradd
-w /usr/sbin/groupadd -p x -k groupadd

If either "useradd" or "groupadd" 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.