By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-force attacks, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account.
RHEL 8 can utilize the "pam_faillock.so" for this purpose. Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the "authselect" program.
From "Pam_Faillock" man pages: Note that the default directory that "pam_faillock" uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the "dir" option.
In RHEL 8.2 the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a "local_users_only" option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout.
Check that the system logs user name information when unsuccessful logon attempts occur with the following commands:
If the system is RHEL version 8.2 or newer, this check is not applicable.
Note: If the System Administrator demonstrates the use of an approved centralized account management method that locks an account after three unsuccessful logon attempts within a period of 15 minutes, this requirement is not applicable.