As information security gatekeepers, CISOs are facing increasing pressures to manage the continuously evolving landscape of risk. One primary issue is the growing concern of insider risk, where the biggest challenge is a lack of visibility when it comes to early detection and prevention. Privileged access management (PAM) can help you protect critical assets and prevent unwanted changes; however, it is vital that you include regular and consistent activity auditing as a part of your PAM strategy.

Current database auditing technologies present practical limitations when it comes to pinpointing specific harmful data changes. Auditing millions of event logs (via Journalling and Redo Logs) or setting up data change alerts (table triggers) often take a negative toll on system performance, are time-consuming to review, and still leave you in the dark.

Therefore, not recognizing fraudulent transactions or harmful data changes swiftly within your seemingly trusted system is common.

Top 3 priorities to increase your insider risk visibility

Manual methods for auditing privileged user activity are inefficient and unsystematic. Still, auditing is the only practical way to maintain the level of visibility and control necessary to protect your critical information assets. Knowing what to prioritize at least, is essential:

• Review privileged user activity. Typically, that of IT users (Database administrators, System administrators, Developers). Those users outside of your organization, such as third-party vendors and contractors. Services that can interact with an operating system, make changes and run scheduled tasks.
• Identify those tables containing critical and sensitive data within your database (master data tables, bank master, customer master, vendor master, etc.) and review the event logs for data changes and deletions.
• Monitor data changes made via the use of data manipulation programs (SQL, SQL Plus, IBM Query, DFU, ODBC, FTP, Toad, etc.)

The solution to eliminating your blind spots

Leveraging your existing database audit technologies, with powerful automated recognition of anomalous data changes, audit trails, and reports, without compromising system performance, TRACE makes the invisible, visible. It allows you to access the details you need easily, so you can act immediately. TRACE is a vital asset to CISOs across major industries providing them with the peace of mind that critical assets are safe.

To learn more about how TRACE can help you overcome your blind spots, please get in touch!