ACCT-9622 - Linux process accounting

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control ACCT-9622 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
Category	Accounting
Application

Description

Process accounting is a method to track system resources. It includes a way to monitor system resources and how these resources are used for the users on the system. On Linux systems, process accounting can be enabled to track these resources.

How to solve

See shell snippet to enable process account. Make sure to monitor disk usage on the related disk partition. ac: statistics about users (uses wtmp file) accton: turn process accounting on/off sa: provides accounting information summarization. Includes previously executed commands, I/O operation times, CPU times. lastcomm: displays previously executed commands

Need more details?

Consider the upgrade to Lynis Enterprise to receive additional details and guidance. The Enterprise version helps to you with daily health checks of your environment, learn in-depth system hardening, and resources to protect your systems better.

See demo

About

Lynis is a technical security auditing tool for Unix flavors like Linux, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and *BSD. It is open source software and free to use. Typical usage include system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability scanning. The project has an active community, including development via GitHub.

Lynis Enterprise

Do you need to collect data from multiple systems or compliance reporting? Lynis Enterprise uses Lynis to collect the data and make your work easier.

Benefits: automate security audits, detailed reporting, compliance testing.

Centralized management
Improvement plan with priorities
Reporting
Dashboards
Predefined policies
Integration (API)
Improvement snippets for tools like Ansible, Chef, Cfengine, Puppet, and SaltStack

Take the Tour