Assignment 7: Key requirements for writing SQL server audits to Windows Security Log

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American Military University

ISSC 431

Professor Christopher Weppler

20 April 2016

Security audits are is a report that identifies and brings about weaknesses of an organization. Security audits allow companied to focus on items that they have to improve on. There are multiple types of security audits: informal audits, formal audits, internal audits, external audits and automated audits (Basta, 2011). Therefore the goal of an audit is to provide accurate view of the organizations internal security controls in order to improve the organization’s security plan. When an audit is first being conducted it needs to be first planned out and everyone needs to prepare for it. In the planning phase, the audit scope is determined. The systems, departments and items that are being audited are determined (Basta, 2011). Some examples of items that get audited are the web server management, e-mail server management, file server administration, web applications, server security, databases and many other components. Some vendors contain their own unique automatic tools in order to help the auditing go a little smoother, such as logging user and database activity. In Microsoft SQL server allows the function to track the logging activities throughout all levels of the database. In order to create audits in Microsoft SQL server the administrator must first create a server audit in order to record the server database level actions. Next, the specification object is created and it will belong to either the server audit object of the database audit object. Datasae level auditing provides the administrator ability to custom audits such as select, update, insert, delete execute and server level auditing can record