Many companies mistakenly assume that unauthorized access is only attempted by external parties. Actually, the majority of corporate security threats stem from internal sources, against which a firewall offers no protection.
A good security strategy includes real-time monitoring for critical security events and periodic analysis of your systems' security logs so that you can detect and respond in a timely fashion to internal and external attacks. In fact, when reviewing the general controls of a corporation, public auditors and regulatory agencies define security-log monitoring as a necessary best practice and a part of performing due diligence.
To monitor your event logs effectively, you need an automated way to backup and clear the event logs network-wide and archive them in a central database. This archiving needs to be done with some intelligence, noise has to be removed and a sensible description added. Without doing this, you will suffer from the following limitations:
No real time monitoring and notification of critical events
Cryptic event descriptions: Certain events that indicate suspicious activity have less than obvious descriptions
No long-term archive.
Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 logs a large ratio of unimportant events, such as workstations polling a domain controller for Group Policy updates. This makes analysis of the data without prior archiving and cleaning difficult/impossible.
Security incidents result in loss of operations, business, customers and revenue and this is not desirable by any organization. Furthermore, recovery time is a very time consuming and expensive process. GFI EventsManager offers a 24/7 real-time intrusion detection and alerting and an early warning signal to enable intrusion countermeasures. It also provides extensive rules to detect insider attacks.
Why use GFI EventsManager to monitor your network against security breaches?
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Identify event patterns and preempt insider attacks through the powerful GFI EventsManager rules database
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Real-time alerts will avoid recovery costs that would otherwise result from network security attacks
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By taking a proactive approach, you will be reducing the risk to disrupt business continuity resulting from a security attack that could have been avoided through proper log management
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Increase productivity by reducing wasted manpower to go over all event logs manually
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Reduce administrative and technical overheads required to manage, archive and the cost to convert apparently meaningless event logs to significant security reports for management.
Essentials
