Title

E-mail Diagnostic Logging is enabled during production operations. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Log files help establish a history of activities, and can be useful in detecting attack attempts or determining tuning adjustments to improve availability. Diagnostic logging, however, characteristically produces large volumes of data and requires care in managing the logs to prevent risk of disk capacity denial of service conditions. Exchange Diagnostic Logging is broken up into 14 main “services” each of which has anywhere from 2 to 26 “categories” of events to be monitored. Moreover, each category may be set to one of four levels of logging: None (logging disabled), Minimum, Medium, and Maximum, depending on how much detail one desires. The higher the level of detail, the more disk space required to store the audit material. Diagnostic logging is intended to help administrators debug problems with their systems, not as a general purpose auditing tool. The diagnostic logs collect a great deal of information – diagnostic log files can grow huge very quickly. Diagnostic logs should be enabled for limited periods of time when attempting to debug relevant pieces of Exchange functionality. Once debugging has finished, diagnostic logging should be disabled again.

Check Content

Review Diagnostic Logging Level Procedure: Exchange System Manager >> Administrative Groups >> [administrative group] >> Servers >> [server] >> Properties >> Diagnostic Logging tab Each item in the left panel, should have a status of “none”. Criteria: If Each item in the left panel, has a status of “none”, this is not a finding.

Fix Text

Configure diagnostic logging. Procedure: Exchange System Manager >> Administrative Groups >> [administrative group] >> Servers >> [server] >> Properties >> Diagnostic Logging For each item, select logging level “none”.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-20352r1_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-18706

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.