The operating system must provide an immediate real-time alert to the SA and ISSO, at a minimum, of all audit failure events requiring real-time alerts.

From Apple OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) Workstation Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with: CCI-001858

SV-74031r1_rule The operating system must provide an immediate real-time alert to the SA and ISSO, at a minimum, of all audit failure events requiring real-time alerts.

Vulnerability discussion

The audit service should be configured to immediately print messages to the console or email administrator users when an auditing failure occurs. It is critical for the appropriate personnel to be aware if a system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required. Without a real-time alert, security personnel may be unaware of an impending failure of the audit capability and system operation may be adversely affected.

Check content

By default, auditd only logs errors to syslog. To see if audit has been configured to print error messages to the console, run the following command: sudo grep logger /etc/security/audit_warn If the argument '-s' is missing, or if audit_warn has not been otherwise modified to print errors to the console or send email alerts to the SA and ISSO, this is a finding.

Fix text

To make auditd log errors to standard error as well as syslogd, run the following command: sudo sed -i.bak 's/logger -p/logger -s -p/' /etc/security/audit_warn; sudo audit -s

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