What is Audit Trail?
Audit trails helps in the maintenance of a record related to system activity by means of system and application processes as well as by user activity of systems and applications. In coincidence with appropriate tools and procedures, audit trails can help in detection of security violations, performance related problems, and flaws in applications. This article studies on audit trails as a technical control and researches the meaning of audit trail, the benefits and objectives of audit trails, the types of audit trails, and tools used for audit trail.Meaning of Audit Trail
An audit trail includes a series of records of computer events, about an operating system, an application, or related user activities. A computer system may have many audit trails, each related to a certain type of activity. Auditing involves a review and analysis process of management, operational, and technical controls. The auditor will be able to get important information about activity on a computer system from the audit trail. An audit trail recovers the auditability of the computer system.Benefits and Objectives of Audit Trail
- Individual Accountability of Enterprises
- Reconstruction of Events in Enterprises
- Intrusion Detection in Enterprises
- Problem Analysis in Enterprises
Types of Audit Trail
A system can preserve several different audit trails at the same time. There are characteristically two kinds of audit records maintained as part of the process of audit trail:- Event based logs typically contain records describing system events, application events, or user events.
- Keystroke monitoring is the procedure utilized to view or record both the keystrokes entered by a computer user and the computer's response throughout an interactive session.
Tools Used for Audit Trail
Many types of tools have been developed to help to lessen the quantity of information contained in audit records concerning audit trail, as well as to collect useful information from the raw data. Particularly on larger systems, audit trail software can generate very large files, which can be very difficult to analyze by hand. Trends or variance-detection tools look for anomalies in either user or system behavior with reference to audit trail.Popular Post
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