The operating system must support the requirement to automatically audit on account creation.

From Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Workstation STIG

Associated with: CCI-000018

SV-65647r1_rule The operating system must support the requirement to automatically audit on account creation.

Vulnerability discussion

Auditing of account creation is a method and best practice for mitigating the risk of an attacker creating a persistent method of reestablishing access. A comprehensive account management process will ensure an audit trail which documents the creation of accounts and if required notifies administrators. Such a process greatly reduces the risk of accounts being created outside the normal approval process and provides logging that can be used for forensic purposes. Additionally, the audit records of account creation can be compared to the known approved account creation list.

Check content

In order to view the currently configured flags for the audit daemon, run the following command: sudo grep ^flags /etc/security/audit_control | sed 's/flags://' | tr "," "\n" | grep ad The account creation events are logged by way of the "ad" flag. If "ad" is not listed in the result of the check, this is a finding.

Fix text

To make sure the appropriate flags are enabled for auditing, run the following command: sudo sed -i.bak '/^flags/ s/$/,ad/' /etc/security/audit_control

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