STIGUI
V-256478CAT II — Medium severitySV-256478r958368_rule

The Photon operating system must audit all account creations.

Rule version PHTN-30-000001 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-31

Discussion

Once an attacker establishes access to a system, the attacker often attempts to create a persistent method of reestablishing access. One way to accomplish this is for the attacker to create an account. Auditing account creation actions provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes.

Check

At the command line, run the following command:

# auditctl -l | grep -E "(useradd|groupadd)"

Expected result:

-w /usr/sbin/useradd -p x -k useradd -w /usr/sbin/groupadd -p x -k groupadd

If either "useradd" or "groupadd" are not listed with a permissions filter of at least "x", this is a finding.

Note: This check depends on the "auditd" service to be in a running state for accurate results. The "auditd" service is enabled in control PHTN-30-000013.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.STIG.rules

Add or update the following lines:

-w /usr/sbin/useradd -p x -k useradd -w /usr/sbin/groupadd -p x -k groupadd

At the command line, run the following command to load the new audit rules:

# /sbin/augenrules --load

Note: A new "audit.STIG.rules" file is provided for placement in "/etc/audit/rules.d" that contains all rules needed for auditd.

Note: An older "audit.STIG.rules" may exist and may reference older "GEN" SRG IDs. This file can be removed and replaced as necessary with an updated one.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-256478
Group title
SRG-OS-000004-GPOS-00004
Rule ID
SV-256478r958368_rule
Check ID
C-60153r887106_chk
Fix ID
F-60096r887107_fix