17.5.4 Ensure 'Audit Other Logon/Logoff 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 other logon/logoff-related events, such as Remote Desktop Services session disconnects and reconnects, using RunAs to run processes under a different account, and locking and unlocking a workstation. Events for this subcategory include:

4649: A replay attack was detected.

4778: A session was reconnected to a Window Station.

4779: A session was disconnected from a Window Station.

4800: The workstation was locked.

4801: The workstation was unlocked.

4802: The screen saver was invoked.

4803: The screen saver was dismissed.

5378: The requested credentials delegation was disallowed by policy.

5632: A request was made to authenticate to a wireless network.

5633: A request was made to authenticate to a wired network.

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

Rationale:

Auditing these events may be useful when investigating a security incident.

Solution

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

auditpol /set /subcategory:'Other Logon/Logoff 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:

No Auditing.

See Also

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