V-981

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 /var/spool/cron/tabs


ls -ld /etc/crontab /etc/cron.{d,daily,hourly,monthly,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.