STIGUI
V-269138CAT II — Medium severitySV-269138r1137691_rule

AlmaLinux OS 9 must require a unique superuser's name upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

Rule version ALMA-09-006400 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-25

Discussion

Having a nondefault grub superuser username makes password-guessing attacks less effective.

Check

Verify the boot loader superuser account has been set with the following command:

$ grep -A1 "superusers" /etc/grub2.cfg 

set superusers="superman" export superusers password_pbkdf2 superman ${GRUB2_PASSWORD}

In this example "superman" is the actual account name, changed from the default "root".

If superusers contains easily guessable usernames, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure AlmaLinux OS 9 to have a unique username for the grub superuser account using the following commands:

$ sed -ri 's/root/superman/' /etc/grub.d/01_users
$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Identifiers

Group ID
V-269138
Group title
SRG-OS-000080-GPOS-00048
Rule ID
SV-269138r1137691_rule
Check ID
C-73169r1047790_chk
Fix ID
F-73070r1049176_fix