Cron and crontab directories must be group-owned by root, sys, bin or cron.

From Oracle Linux 5 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with: CCI-000225

SV-64305r1_rule Cron and crontab directories must be group-owned by root, sys, bin or cron.

Vulnerability discussion

To protect the integrity of scheduled system jobs and to prevent malicious modification to these jobs, crontab files must be secured. Failure to give group-ownership of cron or crontab directories to a system group provides the designated group and unauthorized users with the potential to access sensitive information or change the system configuration which could weaken the system's security posture.

Check content

Check the group owner of cron and crontab directories. Procedure: # ls -ld /var/spool/cron # ls -ld /etc/cron.d /etc/crontab /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.hourly /etc/cron.monthly /etc/cron.weekly or # ls -ld /etc/cron*|grep -v deny If a directory is not group-owned by root, sys, bin, or cron, this is a finding.

Fix text

Change the group owner of cron and crontab directories. # chgrp root

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