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Date:      Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:26:52 -0500
From:      Glen Barber <glen.j.barber@gmail.com>
To:        Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd@quip.cz>
Cc:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: periodic security run output gives false positives after 1 year
Message-ID:  <20120216172652.GA1989@schism.local>
In-Reply-To: <4F3D3722.2000904@quip.cz>
References:  <4F3D3722.2000904@quip.cz>

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On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 06:04:34PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I see it many times before, but never take a time to post about it.
> 
> Scrips in /etc/periodic are grepping logs for yesterday date, but 
> without specifying year (because some logs do not have year logged).
> 
> This results in false positive alerts in security e-mails from our 
> lightly loaded servers, where logs are not enough rotated.
> 
> For example /var/log/auth.log is 62KB (838 lines) and contains entries 
> for almost 2 years.
> 
> Today I get following alert:
> 
> Feb 15 22:36:03 XXX sshd[89758]: Invalid user t1na from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
> Feb 15 22:50:56 XXX sshd[89850]: Invalid user medina from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
> Feb 15 22:50:57 XXX sshd[89852]: Invalid user student from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
> Feb 15 22:50:58 XXX sshd[89854]: Invalid user student from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
> 
> (hostname and IP are replaced by X)
> 
> But looking in to auth.log I found zero entries from yesterday - Feb 15 
> entries were logged 1 year ago!
> 
> So I propose to set all daemons / syslog to log year too (as %Y) and 
> change  yesterday=`date -v-1d "+%b %e "`  to yesterday=`date -v-1d "+%b 
> %e %Y"` in periodic scripts.
> 
> The affected scripts are:
> 460.status-mail-rejects
> 470.status-named
> 800.loginfail
> 900.tcpwrap
> 
> Maybe some others, I did just a quick grep -rsn 'date -v-1d' 
> /etc/periodic and I don't know the logic used in other script to get 
> yesterday messages.
> 
> What do you think about it?
> 

Rotating the appropriate logs daily/weekly/monthly/whatever will silence
these false alarms.

Glen




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