Title

The Information System Security Officer (ISSO) and System Administrator (SA), at a minimum, must be alerted of a SUSE operating system audit processing failure event. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

It is critical for the appropriate personnel to be aware if a system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required. Without this notification, the security personnel may be unaware of an impending failure of the audit capability, and system operation may be adversely affected. Audit processing failures include software/hardware errors, failures in the audit capturing mechanisms, and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded. This requirement applies to each audit data storage repository (i.e., distinct information system component where audit records are stored), the centralized audit storage capacity of organizations (i.e., all audit data storage repositories combined), or both.

Check Content

Verify the administrators are notified in the event of a SUSE operating system audit processing failure by inspecting "/etc/audit/auditd.conf". Check if the system is configured to send email to an account when it needs to notify an administrator with the following command: > sudo grep action_mail /etc/audit/auditd.conf action_mail_acct = root If the value of the "action_mail_acct" keyword is not set to "root" and/or other accounts for security personnel, the "action_mail_acct" keyword is missing, or the returned line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure the auditd service to notify the administrators in the event of a SUSE operating system audit processing failure. Edit the following line in "/etc/audit/auditd.conf" to ensure that administrators are notified via email for those situations: action_mail_acct = root

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-234956r622137_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-234956

Group Title: SRG-OS-000046-GPOS-00022

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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