Vulnerability Discussion

Without the capability to restrict which roles and individuals can select which events are audited, unauthorized personnel may be able to prevent the auditing of critical events.

Misconfigured audits may degrade the system's performance by overwhelming the audit log. Misconfigured audits may also make it more difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

Check

Verify that "/etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/auditd.conf", and "/etc/audit/rules.d/*" files are owned by root account by using the following command:

$ sudo ls -al /etc/audit/audit.rules /etc/audit/auditd.conf /etc/audit/rules.d/* | awk '{print $3, $9}'
root /etc/audit/audit.rules
root /etc/audit/auditd.conf
root /etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules

If "/etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/auditd.conf", or "/etc/audit/rules.d/*" files are owned by a user other than "root", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure "/etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/rules.d/*", and "/etc/audit/auditd.conf" files to be owned by root by using the following command:

$ sudo chown -R root /etc/audit/audit.rules /etc/audit/auditd.conf /etc/audit/rules.d/*