STIGUI
V-281198CAT II — Medium severitySV-281198r1166546_rule

RHEL 10 must ensure account lockouts persist.

Rule version RHEL-10-600430 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

Having lockouts persist across reboots ensures that an account is unlocked only by an administrator. If the lockouts did not persist across reboots, an attacker could reboot the system to continue brute force attacks against the accounts on the system.

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

Check

Verify RHEL 10 is configured so that the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file uses a nondefault "faillock" directory to ensure contents persist after reboot with the following command:

$ sudo grep -w dir /etc/security/faillock.conf dir = /var/log/faillock

If the "dir" option is not set to a nondefault documented tally log directory, is commented out, or is missing, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 10 to maintain the contents of the "faillock" directory after a reboot.

Add/modify the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file to match the following line:

dir = /var/log/faillock

Identifiers

Group ID
V-281198
Group title
SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005
Rule ID
SV-281198r1166546_rule
Check ID
C-85759r1166544_chk
Fix ID
F-85664r1166545_fix