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Part 6: Disabling and removing unnecessary accounts


Gary Smith
10.16.2002
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Disable or Remove Unnecessary Accounts
For Solaris, the following userids are created during installation, and are required by the operating system. You should lock these accounts or assign an invalid shell such as /bin/false to prevent hackers from using them to log in to your system:

adm
bin
daemon
listen
lp
nobody
noaccess
nuucp
root
smtp
sys
uucp

Make Sure Disabled User Accounts Are Given an Invalid Shell
Solaris will not log in for an account that is assigned an invalid shell. This is a good "defense in depth" strategy to prevent hackers from using default accounts to gain access to your host.

Assign the shell /bin/true or /bin/false as the shell for accounts that should never be allowed to log in. A better solution is to use a locally compiled version of the noshell (http://www.fish.com/titan/src1/noshell.c) program.

Closeout FTP Access to Disable User Accounts
Create the file /etc/ftpusers and add the following default Solaris accounts to the file.

adm
bin
daemon
listen
lp
nobody
noaccess
nuucp
root
smtp
sys
uucp

Review User Accounts for Configuration Errors
- Verify that all who have accounts have a valid need to access the system.
- Verify that access to the root account is restricted.
- Make sure all accounts have an x in the password field in /etc/passwd to force the use of Solaris' shadow password file.
- Check /etc/shadow to make sure disabled accounts have either NP or *LK* in the password field.
- Make sure /etc/shadow is owned by root and the file permissions are rw-------.
- Check that no accounts other than root and smtp have UID of 0.
- Use the command logins -p to check for accounts that do not require a password to log in.
- Check /etc/group for the presence of a wheel group (group 0). If supported, the list of users for this group should not be null.
- Note that only those users shown in the user list for the wheel group will be allowed to su to root. All other users will be denied access, even if they enter the correct password.
- Run COPS or similar programs to verify that all default passwords have been changed.

Click here for the rest of this 12-part tip.


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