Title

Cron and crontab directories must be group-owned by root, sys, or bin. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

To protect the integrity of scheduled system jobs and to prevent malicious modification to these jobs, crontab files must be secured. Failure to give group-ownership of cron or crontab directories to a system group provides the designated group and unauthorized users with the potential to access sensitive information or change the system configuration which could weaken the system's security posture.

Check Content

Check the group owner of the crontab directories. Procedure: # ls -ld /var/spool/cron/crontabs If the directory is not group-owned by root, sys, or bin, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Change the group owner of the crontab directories to root, sys, or bin. Procedure: # chgrp root /var/spool/cron/crontabs

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-227751r603266_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-227751

Group Title: SRG-OS-000480

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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