STIGUI
V-281196CAT II — Medium severitySV-281196r1166540_rule

RHEL 10 must automatically lock an account when three unsuccessful login attempts occur during a 15-minute time period.

Rule version RHEL-10-600420 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

By limiting the number of failed login attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128, SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005

Check

Verify RHEL 10 locks an account after three unsuccessful login attempts within a period of 15 minutes with the following command:

$ sudo grep fail_interval /etc/security/faillock.conf fail_interval = 900

If the "fail_interval" option is not set to "900" or less (but not "0"), the line is commented out, or the line is missing, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 10 to lock out the "root" account after a number of incorrect login attempts within 15 minutes using "pam_faillock.so".

Enable the feature using the following command:

$ authselect enable-feature with-faillock

Edit the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file as follows:

fail_interval = 900

Identifiers

Group ID
V-281196
Group title
SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128
Rule ID
SV-281196r1166540_rule
Check ID
C-85757r1166538_chk
Fix ID
F-85662r1166539_fix