Vulnerability Discussion

Inactive identifiers pose a risk to systems and applications because attackers may exploit an inactive identifier and potentially obtain undetected access to the system.

Automatically disabling inactive accounts ensures that accounts which may not have been responsibly removed are not available to threat actors who may have compromised their credentials.

Owners of inactive accounts will not notice if unauthorized access to their user account has been obtained.

Check

Verify that AlmaLinux OS 9 account identifiers (individuals, groups, roles, and devices) are disabled after 35 days of inactivity with the following command:

$ useradd -D | grep INACTIVE

INACTIVE=35

If the value of "INACTIVE" is set to "-1", a value greater than "35", or is missing, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure AlmaLinux OS 9 to disable account identifiers after 35 days of inactivity after the password expiration.

Run the following command to change the configuration for useradd:

$ useradd -D -f 35

The recommendation is 35 days, but a lower value is acceptable.