STIGUI
V-261356CAT II — Medium severitySV-261356r996518_rule

SLEM 5 must never automatically remove or disable emergency administrator accounts.

Rule version SLEM-05-411050 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-20

Discussion

Emergency administrator accounts, also known as "last resort" or "break glass" accounts, are local logon accounts enabled on the system for emergency use by authorized system administrators to manage a system when standard logon methods are failing or not available. Emergency accounts are not subject to manual removal or scheduled expiration requirements.

Check

Verify SLEM 5 is configured such that emergency administrator accounts are never automatically removed or disabled with the following command:

Note: Root is typically the "account of last resort" on a system and is also used as the example emergency administrator account. If another account is being used as the emergency administrator account, the command should be used against that account.

     > sudo chage -l <emergency_administrator_account_name> | grep -E '(Password|Account) expires' 
     Password expires: never
     Account expires: never

If "Password expires" or "Account expires" is set to anything other than "never", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure SLEM 5 to never automatically remove or disable emergency administrator accounts.

     > sudo chage -I -1 -M 99999 <emergency_administrator_account_name>

Identifiers

Group ID
V-261356
Group title
SRG-OS-000123-GPOS-00064
Rule ID
SV-261356r996518_rule
Check ID
C-65085r996517_chk
Fix ID
F-64993r995934_fix