Frequently Asked Questions

When you discovered an issue with Lynis, this can reported in two ways:
1. via lynis-dev@cisofy.com, 2. as an issue on GitHub

When you want to renew a license of Lynis Enterprise, simply order again. If you already have a license, we will renew your current license code. This way no configuration changes are required on your end.

Run Lynis with --report-file /root/new-report.dat

Lynis does not need root permissions to run on a system. It will be able to run most of the tests as a non-privileged user. For the best audit results, we do recommend to use root permissions though. This can be achieved via sudo or switch to the root user.

The number of output formats is kept to a minimum. Each format would introduce overhead and therefore impact the performance of the tool. By default, there is a screen output and a data report in a key-value format.

If you like to have an HTML file of the screen output, run 'lynis audit system | ansi2html -la > report.html'. The ansi2html tool can be installed with your package manager (e.g. yum install python-ansi2html or apt install kbtin).

For a more in-depth report in HTML and other formats, there is also the Lynis Enterprise version. This web-based solution provides browsable data and export to CSV, JSON, PDF, and makes the data available via API.

Lynis looks in a few directories, like /etc/lynis. The easiest way to discover what profiles Lynis discovered, is running: lynis show profiles

As security is an ongoing process, we suggest running Lynis daily. This can be done automatically via a scheduled cronjob.

Use lynis audit system --debug --verbose to see which test is taking a long time. Consider disabling the particular test.

Use 'lynis show settings' to determine the combined settings of al discovered profiles.

Determine the related field that is causing this with awk -F= '{print $1}' /var/log/lynis-report.dat | sort | uniq -c | sort -b -n | tail -3 | sort -r -n

This command will show the three most repeated lines. Use the grep command to find the related test. If the test starts with "PLGN", perform the grep in your PLUGINDIR (lynis show plugindir), otherwise use the INCLUDEDIR (lynis show includedir).

Yes, we have a self-hosted version (on-premises) available. Companies who prefer to keep data internally, or have multiple business units, can leverage this option.

The data that is being uploaded by the Lynis client can be found in /var/log/lynis-report.dat. It contains the most important data parts found during the audit.

Yes, it is really free to use. Also, it is open source and fairly easy to understand, as it is written in shell script. Have a look at the GitHub page to see how it works.

Go to https://packages.cisofy.com

Typically we release every few months a new version of Lynis. How in the meantime you can always check GitHub for the latest development version.