Audit log viewer pro password#
For instance, a user wanting to log into a fellow employee's account on a corporate network might wait until after hours to gain unobserved physical access to the computer in their cubicle surreptitiously use a hardware keylogger to obtain their password and later log into that user's account through Terminal Services from a Wi-Fi hotspot whose IP address cannot be traced back to the intruder.Īfter the log is cleared through Event Viewer, one log entry is immediately created in the freshly cleared log noting the time it was cleared and the admin who cleared it. Simply being aware of how the Security Log works can be enough to take precautions against detection. Log manipulation is not needed for all attacks. If users are aware that the log is copied over to the remote log server at :00 of every hour, for instance, they may take measures to defeat that system by attacking at :10 and then deleting the relevant log events before the top of the next hour. Keeping the IT department's security systems and practices confidential helps prevent users from formulating ways to cover their tracks. Īs Benton points out, one way of preventing successful attacks is security through obscurity. Microsoft notes, "It is possible to detect attempts to elude a security monitoring solution with such techniques, but it is challenging to do so because many of the same events that can occur during an attempt to cover the tracks of intrusive activity are events that occur regularly on any typical business network". The policy change itself could be logged, depending on the "audit policy change" setting, but this event could be deleted from the log using Winzapper and from that point onward, the activity would not generate a trail in the Security Log. Īnother way to defeat the Security Log would be for a user to log in as Administrator and change the auditing policies to stop logging the unauthorized activity he intends to carry out.
Audit log viewer pro windows#
Randy Franklin Smith's Ultimate Windows Security points out that given the ability of administrators to manipulate the Security Log to cover unauthorized activity, separation of duty between operations and security-monitoring IT staff, combined with frequent backups of the log to a server accessible only to the latter, can improve security. It is possible to set the log to not overwrite old events, but as Chris Benton notes, "the only problem is that NT has a really bad habit of crashing when its logs become full". A partial defense against this is to increase the maximum log size so that a greater number of events will be required to flood the log. This makes it susceptible to attacks in which an intruder can flood the log by generating a large number of new events. Īs the log approaches its maximum size, it can either overwrite old events or stop logging new events. A defense against this is to set up a remote log server with all services shut off, allowing only console access. For this reason, once the Administrator account has been compromised, the event history as contained in the Security Log is unreliable. In addition, an Administrator can use Winzapper to delete specific events from the log.
It is also possible to filter the log using customized criteria.Īdministrators are allowed to view and clear the log (there is no way to separate the rights to view and clear the log). Third-party utilities have been developed to help identify suspicious trends. The sheer number of loggable events means that security log analysis can be a time-consuming task. The categories of events that can be logged are: Windows 2000 Web Server, for instance, does not log IP addresses for successful logins, but Windows Server 2003 includes this capability. Depending on the version of Windows and the method of login, the IP address may or may not be recorded. If the audit policy is set to record logins, a successful login results in the user's user name and computer name being logged as well as the user name they are logging into.