17.9.2 Ensure 'Audit Other System Events' is set to 'Success and Failure'

Warning! Audit Deprecated

This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

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Information

This subcategory reports on other system events. Events for this subcategory include:

5024 : The Windows Firewall Service has started successfully.

5025 : The Windows Firewall Service has been stopped.

5027 : The Windows Firewall Service was unable to retrieve the security policy from the local storage. The service will continue enforcing the current policy.

5028 : The Windows Firewall Service was unable to parse the new security policy. The service will continue with currently enforced policy.

5029: The Windows Firewall Service failed to initialize the driver. The service will continue to enforce the current policy.

5030: The Windows Firewall Service failed to start.

5032: Windows Firewall was unable to notify the user that it blocked an application from accepting incoming connections on the network.

5033 : The Windows Firewall Driver has started successfully.

5034 : The Windows Firewall Driver has been stopped.

5035 : The Windows Firewall Driver failed to start.

5037 : The Windows Firewall Driver detected critical runtime error. Terminating.

5058: Key file operation.

5059: Key migration operation.

The recommended state for this setting is: Success and Failure.

Rationale:

Capturing these audit events may be useful for identifying when the Windows Firewall is not performing as expected.

Solution

To establish the recommended configuration via auditpol.exe, perform the following:

auditpol /set /subcategory:'Other System Events' /success:enable /failure:enable

Note: Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) does not recognize nor respond to the Advanced Audit Policy Configuration GPO settings, so you cannot use them to deploy to that older OS. Microsoft did not add GPO support for those settings until Windows Server 2008 R2. You must use auditpol.exe to configure the audit settings on the older OS.

Impact:

If no audit settings are configured, or if audit settings are too lax on the computers in your organization, security incidents might not be detected or not enough evidence will be available for network forensic analysis after security incidents occur. However, if audit settings are too severe, critically important entries in the Security log may be obscured by all of the meaningless entries and computer performance and the available amount of data storage may be seriously affected. Companies that operate in certain regulated industries may have legal obligations to log certain events or activities.

Default Value:

Success and Failure.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/2750