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.

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

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

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