All public directories must be owned by a system account.

From Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with: CCI-000366

SV-50500r2_rule All public directories must be owned by a system account.

Vulnerability discussion

Allowing a user account to own a world-writable directory is undesirable because it allows the owner of that directory to remove or replace any files that may be placed in the directory by other users.

Check content

The following command will discover and print world-writable directories that are not owned by a system account, given the assumption that only system accounts have a uid lower than 500. Run it once for each local partition [PART]: # find [PART] -xdev -type d -perm -0002 -uid +499 -print If there is output, this is a finding.

Fix text

All directories in local partitions which are world-writable should be owned by root or another system account. If any world-writable directories are not owned by a system account, this should be investigated. Following this, the files should be deleted or assigned to an appropriate group.

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