All Security & Compliance features work by intercepting Audit Failure and Audit Success events from the Security events. As such, the respective audit features need to be enabled in the security policy of the computers being monitored. For example, in order to track the creation of new user accounts, the Account Management policy needs to be enabled.
All features can be configured to automatically turn on auditing for you if it's not already enabled, however we still recommend to enable auditing on the domain level using group policies when possible.
Please see the list below to identify which auditing options are required by the respective features:
Required Audit Configuration for Security & Compliance |
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Security & Compliance Feature |
Auditing Category / Subcategory Windows Vista and later |
Legacy Audit Category |
Process Tracking |
Detailed Tracking: - Audit Process Creation - Audit Process Termination |
Audit process tracking (Success) |
Logon Tracking (Console Sessions) |
Logon and Logoff: - Logon - Logoff |
Audit logon events |
Logon Tracking (Network Logons) |
Account Logon: - Credential Validation - Kerberos Authentication Service - Kerberos Service Ticket Operations - Other Account Logon Events |
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File Access Tracking |
Object Access: - File System |
Audit object access |
Account Management Tracking |
Account Management: all subcategories |
Audit account management |
Policy Change Tracking |
Policy Change: - Audit Policy Change - Authentication Policy Change - Authorization Policy Change |
Audit policy change |
Print Tracking |
Enable "Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Operational" event log |
Log spooler information events |
Registry Change Tracking |
Object Access: - Registry |
n/a |
Permission Inventory |
n/a |
n/a |
Once the required auditing options have been determined, one of the following three options can be used to enable auditing. The required auditing setting from the Required Auditing column will be referred to as [Auditing Option].
| 1. | You can have the EventSentry agent automatically enable the required auditing setting when the service starts by selecting "Auditing On" from the Requested Audit Policy. In this case make sure that no top-level policies are overwriting policy settings set by the EventSentry agent. |
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Using the EventSentry agent to automatically enable "Process Tracking"
| 2. | There are multiple ways to enable auditing outside of EventSentry: |
Windows 2008 (and higher) with "Force audity policy subcategory settings" enabled
Open the appropriate group policy or open the "Domain Security Policy". There, navigate to "Advanced Audit Policy Configuration" and expand the appropriate category (refer to table "Required Audit Configuration for Security & Compliance" above). There, configure the required settings to "Audit Success".
Windows 2008 (and higher) without "Force audity policy subcategory settings" enabled (not recommended)
Open the appropriate group policy or open the "Domain Security Policy". There, navigate to "Audit Policy" and set the appropriate legacy audit policy (refer to table "Required Audit Configuration for Security & Compliance" above). There, configure the required settings to "Audit Success".
| 3. | The security event log "Log Size" needs to be configured to "Overwrite events as needed", it also recommended to specify a size of at least 2048kb. The EventSentry agent will write an error message upon startup to the application event log if the event log is not correctly configured. |
You can change the "Log size" settings by opening up "Event Viewer" (from Administrative Tools) and right-clicking "Security Log". Select "Properties" from the menu and verify that the "Log size" is correctly set to "Overwrite events as needed". Also verify that the "Maximum log size" is sufficiently big.
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To disable previously enabled auditing of the Operating System, set the Requested Audit Policy to Auditing Off. Make sure that no domain policies overwrite or conflict with policy settings in EventSentry. |
