AUTH-9208 - Duplicate accounts or IDs

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control AUTH-9208 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
CategoryAuthentication
Application

Description

Lynis checks for any duplicates by checking the passwd file and count them. Any ID which shows up more than a single time is reported as a finding. Accounts and user IDs should be unique to enable proper accounting. Using several accounts with the same ID may result in data loss.

How to solve

Check for duplicate IDs (see shell script) and remove a duplicate, or give the second user a new ID.

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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.

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