Title

Auditing of Backup and Restore Privileges must be turned off. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Maintaining an audit trail of system activity logs can help identify configuration errors, troubleshoot service disruptions, and analyze compromises that have occurred, as well as detect attacks. Audit logs are necessary to provide a trail of evidence in case the system or network is compromised. Collecting this data is essential for analyzing the security of information assets and detecting signs of suspicious and unexpected behavior. This setting prevents the system from generating audit events for every file backed up or restored which could fill the security log in Windows, making it difficult to identify actual issues.

Check Content

Analyze the system using the Security Configuration and Analysis snap-in. (See "Performing Analysis with the Security Configuration and Analysis Snap-in" in the STIG Overview document.) Expand the Security Configuration and Analysis tree view. Navigate to Local Policies -> Security Options. If the value for "Audit: Audit the use of Backup and Restore privilege" is not set to "Disabled", this is a finding. The policy referenced configures the following registry value: Registry Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Registry Path: \System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa Value Name: FullPrivilegeAuditing Value Type: REG_BINARY Value: 0

Fix Text

Configure the policy value for Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> "Audit: Audit the use of Backup and Restore privilege" to "Disabled".

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-48168r1_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-14229

Group Title: Audit Backup and Restore Privileges

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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