The system must not have the talk or ntalk services active.

From AIX 6.1 SECURITY TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE

Associated with IA controls: ECSC-1

Associated with: CCI-001436

SV-38714r1_rule The system must not have the talk or ntalk services active.

Vulnerability discussion

The talk and ntalk commands allow users on the same or different systems on converse. The talk daemons are started from the inetd process and run as root. These unnecessary processes increase the attack vector of the system and may cause Denial of Service by scrambling the users display.

Check content

Check the /etc/inetd.conf file for talk and ntalk services. #grep talk /etc/inetd.conf | grep -v \# If any TCP or UDP talk or ntalk services are enabled, this is a finding.

Fix text

Edit /etc/inetd.conf and comment out TCP and UDP for the talk service. Edit /etc/inetd.conf and comment out TCP and UDP for the ntalk service. Restart the inetd service. # refresh -s inetd

Pro Tips

Lavender hyperlinks in small type off to the right (of CSS class id, if you view the page source) point to globally unique URIs for each document and item. Copy the link location and paste anywhere you need to talk unambiguously about these things.

You can obtain data about documents and items in other formats. Simply provide an HTTP header Accept: text/turtle or Accept: application/rdf+xml.