E-mail Diagnostic Logging is enabled during production operations.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-18706	EMG2-811 Exch2K3	SV-20352r1_rule	ECSC-1	Medium

Description
Log files help establish a history of activities, and can be useful in detecting attack attempts or determining tuning adjustments to improve availability. Diagnostic logging, however, characteristically produces large volumes of data and requires care in managing the logs to prevent risk of disk capacity denial of service conditions. Exchange Diagnostic Logging is broken up into 14 main “services” each of which has anywhere from 2 to 26 “categories” of events to be monitored. Moreover, each category may be set to one of four levels of logging: None (logging disabled), Minimum, Medium, and Maximum, depending on how much detail one desires. The higher the level of detail, the more disk space required to store the audit material. Diagnostic logging is intended to help administrators debug problems with their systems, not as a general purpose auditing tool. The diagnostic logs collect a great deal of information – diagnostic log files can grow huge very quickly. Diagnostic logs should be enabled for limited periods of time when attempting to debug relevant pieces of Exchange functionality. Once debugging has finished, diagnostic logging should be disabled again.

Description

Log files help establish a history of activities, and can be useful in detecting attack attempts or determining tuning adjustments to improve availability. Diagnostic logging, however, characteristically produces large volumes of data and requires care in managing the logs to prevent risk of disk capacity denial of service conditions. Exchange Diagnostic Logging is broken up into 14 main “services” each of which has anywhere from 2 to 26 “categories” of events to be monitored. Moreover, each category may be set to one of four levels of logging: None (logging disabled), Minimum, Medium, and Maximum, depending on how much detail one desires. The higher the level of detail, the more disk space required to store the audit material. Diagnostic logging is intended to help administrators debug problems with their systems, not as a general purpose auditing tool. The diagnostic logs collect a great deal of information – diagnostic log files can grow huge very quickly. Diagnostic logs should be enabled for limited periods of time when attempting to debug relevant pieces of Exchange functionality. Once debugging has finished, diagnostic logging should be disabled again.

STIG	Date
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003	2014-08-19

Details

Check Text ( C-22424r1_chk )
Review Diagnostic Logging Level Procedure: Exchange System Manager >> Administrative Groups >> [administrative group] >> Servers >> [server] >> Properties >> Diagnostic Logging tab Each item in the left panel, should have a status of “none”. Criteria: If Each item in the left panel, has a status of “none”, this is not a finding.

Fix Text (F-19352r1_fix)
Configure diagnostic logging. Procedure: Exchange System Manager >> Administrative Groups >> [administrative group] >> Servers >> [server] >> Properties >> Diagnostic Logging For each item, select logging level “none”.