Cron and crontab directories must be group-owned by root, sys, bin or cron.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-981	GEN003140	SV-37476r1_rule	ECLP-1	Medium

Description
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.

Description

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.

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2016-06-01

Details

Check Text ( C-36142r1_chk )
Check the group owner of cron and crontab directories. Procedure: # ls -ld /var/spool/cron # ls -ld /etc/cron.d /etc/crontab /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.hourly /etc/cron.monthly /etc/cron.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.

Fix Text (F-31388r1_fix)
Change the group owner of cron and crontab directories. # chgrp root