How Is Auditing Related to Security?

Auditing helps to detect potential security breaches by revealing suspicious or abnormal patterns of system usage. Auditing also provides a means to trace suspect actions back to a particular user, thus serving as a deterrent. Users who know that their activities are being audited are less likely to attempt malicious activities.

To protect a computer system, especially a system on a network, requires mechanisms that control activities before system processes or user processes begin. Security requires tools that monitor activities as the activities occur. Security also requires reports of activities after the activities have happened.

Best practice requires that audit parameters be set before users log in or system processes begin, because most audit activity involves monitoring current events and reporting the events that meet the specified parameters. How the audit service monitors and reports these events is discussed in detail in Chapter 27, Planning for Auditing and Chapter 28, Managing Auditing (Tasks).

Auditing cannot prevent hackers from unauthorized entry. However, the audit service can report, for example, that a specific user performed specific actions at a specific time and date. The audit report can identify the user by entry path and user name. Such information can be reported immediately to your terminal and to a file for later analysis. Thus, the audit service provides data that helps you determine the following:

• How system security was compromised

• What loopholes need to be closed to ensure the desired level of security