STIGUI
V-257927CAT II — Medium severitySV-257927r1268251_rule

RHEL 9 cron configuration files directory must be group-owned by root.

Rule version RHEL-09-232235 · STIG v2 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

Service configuration files enable or disable features of their respective services that if configured incorrectly can lead to insecure and vulnerable configurations; therefore, service configuration files should be owned by the correct group to prevent unauthorized changes.

Check

Verify the group ownership of all cron configuration files with the following command:

$ stat -c "%G %n" /etc/cron*

root /etc/cron.d root /etc/cron.daily root /etc/cron.deny root /etc/cron.hourly root /etc/cron.monthly root /etc/crontab root /etc/cron.weekly

If any crontab is not group owned by root, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure any cron configuration not group-owned by root with the following command:

$ sudo chgrp root [cron config file]

Identifiers

Group ID
V-257927
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-257927r1268251_rule
Check ID
C-61668r925766_chk
Fix ID
F-61592r925767_fix