Monitoring commands run as root

In this use case, we use Wazuh and Linux Audit system to monitor all commands executed using root privileges.

Ubuntu endpoint

  1. Add the rules below in the /etc/audit/audit.rules audit rule file:

    # echo "-a exit,always -F euid=0 -F arch=b64 -S execve -k audit-wazuh-c" >> /etc/audit/audit.rules
    # echo "-a exit,always -F euid=0 -F arch=b32 -S execve -k audit-wazuh-c" >> /etc/audit/audit.rules
    
    • -a always,exit: Specifies that the audit event should always be generated, regardless of whether the system call was successful or not.

    • -S execve: Specifies that the rule should match events that involve the execve system call.

    • -F euid=0: Specifies that the rule should only match events where the effective user ID (euid) is equal to 0, which is the root user.

    • -k audit-wazuh-c: Specifies a key value that will be used to tag the generated audit events.

    Overall, this rule generates audit events for every execution of the execve system call by the root user (euid=0) and tags those events with the key "audit-wazuh-c".

  2. Reload the audit rules to apply the changes:

    # auditctl -R /etc/audit/audit.rules
    # auditctl -l
    
    -w /home -p w -k audit-wazuh-w
    -w /home -p a -k audit-wazuh-a
    -w /home -p r -k audit-wazuh-r
    -w /home -p x -k audit-wazuh-x
    -a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S execve -F euid=0 -F key=audit-wazuh-c
    -a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S execve -F euid=0 -F key=audit-wazuh-c
    

Test the configuration

Perform the following actions below.

  1. Run the following command as a regular user using root privileges:

    $ sudo touch newfile.txt
    
  2. Run the command below as the root user:

    # touch newfile2.txt
    

You can visualize the alerts for rule.id:80792 in the Wazuh dashboard.

Monitoring commands run as root
root commands alerts

Checking the euid field, we see both actions were performed using root privileges. It is also possible to go further and see who initiated the action by checking the auid field.