According to a new report by Gemalto, published in “The Journal”, the number of breaches in the education sector during the first half of 2017 has doubled compared the previous year. 118 successful attacks in the education sector accounted for 13% of all breaches in that period.
As per a Ponemon Institute study, malicious attacks, human error and process failures are the main causes of data breaches in the education sector. In Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, it was found that the cost involved in data breaches taking place in the education sector is the second highest when compared to all other industries.
So, what does that tell us? Security threats in the education are getting worse, attacks are becoming more prevalent and they are very expensive to fix!
Will native auditing help address security concerns?
The first step towards protecting your network is identifying the threats that your organization faces. With a mountain of data being generated on your servers, using native auditing methods to track changes may not be a wise decision. I’ve laid out just a few reasons why you may face challenges relying on, say, Event Viewer:
- Multiple event logs are generated for a single event in the Event Viewer. Extracting the required details from these logs is a lengthy and complex task.
- The event details are not displayed in a logical way. It therefore requires a lot of effort to format the information.
- Admins have to go through multiple logs to trace the required change sequence, which is subject to human error.
- A large amount of disk space is needed to store the large volumes of event logs generated.
- A lot of manual work is needed to track and monitor modifications.
Why organizations in the Educational Sector need an auditing solution
Having a powerful auditing solution enables you to get an overview of all changes being made in your IT environment. Auditing solutions also inform you about the accesses made to data, permission changes and configuration changes made in the IT environment. They also help you meet regulatory compliances; such as GDPR, FISMA, GLBA, HIPAA, SOX and PCI.
Free Solutions
If you want to ovecome the drawbacks of native auditing methods for free, LepideAuditor Freeware Edition may provide you with everything you need. This free solution has been exclusively designed to help IT departments get a summary of changes taking place in their network environment. Some of the key features of this Freeware are:
- Monitoring and tracking changes in the Active Directory, Group Policy and Exchange Server with the help of “All Environment Changes” report.
- The reports generated by our solution offers a summary of events with granular details.
- Our reports deliver where and when details of all the events.
However, the Freeware Edition of LepideAuditor does have some limitations; such as logs not being stored for more than 24 hours and some details in the recorded events are omitted. If you want to overcome the limitations of Freeware, you’ll have to opt for the paid solution, LepideAuditor.
LepideAuditor – more than just an ordinary auditing solution
LepideAuditor Enterprise Edition represents a more comprehensive solution to auditing requirements. It gives you get complete visibility into all the activities taking place in the added server components. Take a look below at some of the features included in the solution:
- Real-time alerts on threat patterns
- Mobile Application
- A powerful search feature
- Meeting compliance mandates
- Easily roll-back changes
Our solution offers two different types of real-time alerts, either based on a single condition or on a defined policy.
The LepideAuditor mobile app is a fantastic application that has been designed to work on iPhone, iPad or any Android smartphones and tablets. You can monitor changes taking place in your network by enabling LiveFeed straight to the app.
This feature, with advanced search filters, lets you interrogate data quickly and easily. Accessing the required data has been simplified to a large extent with this inbuilt feature.
Now you can meet all manner of compliance standards with our state-of-the-art auditing solution using a set of predefined audit reports. These reports have been designed to meet the most common compliances across all industrial sectors, including those specific to the education sector.
There are instances when intentional or accidental changes are made to the critical components of the network. In such cases, Lepide Object Restore Wizard (built into LepideAuditor) enables you to easily roll back changes made to the objects to their original state.