NETW-3032 - ARP monitoring

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control NETW-3032 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
CategoryNetworking
Application

Description

Consider the usage of a tool which monitors ARP traffic

How to solve

The network is a dynamic environment where devices show up and disappear again. Proper monitoring of devices can help with the detection of intruders, or find the cause of network issues for some systems.

This control checks for the presence of a tool like arpwatch. Such tool helps with monitoring the network and store ARP requests. Any device showing up on the network subnet will also show up in the tool. Depending on your environment you might want to consider to deploy this tooling only on one system, instead of each system. In such case it is suggested to disable the control in your Lynis profile.

Need more details?

Consider the upgrade to Lynis Enterprise to receive additional details and guidance. The Enterprise version helps to you with daily health checks of your environment, learn in-depth system hardening, and resources to protect your systems better.

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About

Lynis is a technical security auditing tool for Unix flavors like Linux, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and *BSD. It is open source software and free to use. Typical usage include system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability scanning. The project has an active community, including development via GitHub.

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