Vulnerability 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.

Check

Verify that the administrators are notified in the event of an audit processing failure.

Check that the "/etc/aliases" file has a defined value for "root".

$ sudo grep "postmaster:\s*root$" /etc/aliases

If the command does not return a line, or the line is commented out, ask the system administrator to indicate how they and the information systems security officer (ISSO) are notified of an audit process failure. If there is no evidence of the proper personnel being notified of an audit processing failure, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure a valid email address as an alias for the root account.

Append the following line to "/etc/aliases":

postmaster: root

Then, run the following command:

$ sudo newaliases