It appears nowadays that newspapers essentially have to carry some news on pickpocketing, cellphone and vehicle thefts, ATM robberies, kidnapping, etc.; the newest additions to the list are cybercrimes and data thefts. It’s strange why there are so many incursive minds around us trying to exploit even minor security lapses. Miscreants are operating in almost all walks of life, attempting to evade from the eyes of those who maintain law and order.
I will just mention two simple cat-and-mouse like situations that you also may be familiar with. One can have a perception that the mouse is uncapturable in all cat-and-mouse games, mainly because of the ever-popular Tom and Jerry series. In real life situations, however, it is the cat that always wins. The same is true with police-thief confrontations too.
My friend Charlie, who runs a retail outlet in the town, relies on CCTV cameras to safeguard his outlet. He has around twenty-five surveillance cameras installed inside and outside his outlet to surveil every nook and corner of his premises. Whenever I visit, I find his manager sitting near the billing desk gazing at the screen deliberating on the movements captured by the CCTV cameras. I am sure not even a single person can escape from his inquisitive eyes continuously looking for miscreants. No wonder why Charlie is so relaxed after the installation of this surveillance system.
While Charlie is watchful of shoplifters who may steal supplies and cash; my boss, who runs a mid-sized organization with around hundred physical workstations, is in look out for data hungry chaps who may leak valuable information through the security holes of the Windows file server network. My boss is not alone—all organizations using file servers for day-to-day working is on the same spree.
You may feel that Charlie is lucky as he can secure his outlet through a few CCTV cameras. But I can assure you, my boss too is smart; smart enough to keep all file server activities under scrutiny. All file servers of the organization are completely under the radar of a robust file server auditing mechanism.
Don’t assume that file server auditing is something like a James Bond movie with chasing, firing, and attack against villains. The system administrator simply sits on his chair going through the generated audit reports collected by the auditing software so as to understand the activities of employees on various files and folders—just as Charlie’s manager sits near the bill desk.
File server auditing features can be seen in the recent versions of Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. After enabling object access auditing policy settings and then configuring SACL for the object at the system level, one can track important events like file/folder deletions and permission changes in Windows security logs. But the only issue is the difficulty in finding the required information from the endless logs. However, this methods suits you well if you are technically adept and good at searching a needle in haystack!
Of course there is a better way for file server auditing—using professional File Server Auditing Solutions. Auditor for File Server is one such option. Advantages here are many. Administrators can streamline the auditing to what they want to audit. Tailor-made reports as well as custom reports are there to provide information related to each and every activity. With a few mouse clicks, admins can find the required information without any difficulty. And most importantly they can ‘bell the mouse’—they can configure alerts on critical file server activities so that they will be alerted in case such activities happen in the network. Wow! How easy does file server auditing sounds like now!