File integrity monitoring (FIM) tools play a crucial role in securing sensitive information and ensuring data security and privacy. Employing a FIM solution to conserve data integrity is the first line of defense against data tampering attacks. However, in the long term, organizations are mandated to adhere to FIM best practices to proactively detect data leakage and data loss attacks, and to demonstrate compliance with data security mandates such as PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and GLBA.
Before we delve into the best practices in file monitoring, check out this page on what FIM is to understand the basics of FIM.
10 best practices to safeguard data integrity
- Identify critical assets that need to be monitored
- Identify sensitive data that needs to be secured
- Regulate file audit permission settings
- Regulate file access controls
- Monitor user-centric file activities
- Ensure proactive threat detection
- Establish a reactive incident response
- Choose a user-friendly and scalable FIM tool
- Integrate FIM with other security solutions
- Conduct user awareness training
1. Identify critical assets that need to be monitored
Identifying and configuring the most critical assets in the network for file monitoring prevents excessive log generation by the FIM tool. Excessive logs create clutter and unwanted noise that overload the tool, affecting optimal performance. Furthermore, it also leads to the generation of false positive alerts, resulting in alert fatigue in SOC teams. Some of the conventional critical assets include Windows and Linux file systems, file servers, and databases.
2. Identify sensitive data that needs to be secured
After identifying critical assets, the next step is to identify the most critical data within these assets. For instance, in Windows file systems, system files, configuration files, directory files, and registry files are some of the most confidential data. For organizations, personally identifiable information (PII) of employees, users, and customers are particularly vulnerable.
Apart from system data and PII, organizations are also required to monitor sector-specific data to adhere to compliance mandates. For example, the finance sector manages personal financial information and payment card details to comply with the PCI DSS and SOX. Likewise, the healthcare sector deals with patient health information and insurance data to comply with HIPAA. Therefore, it is important to discover, assess, classify, and configure data under FIM with relevance to the criticality of data and industry-specific compliance mandates.
3. Regulate file audit permission settings
File audit permission settings determine if a file needs auditing or not. When the audit permission settings are enabled for a folder, activities like file creation, modification, deletion and file renames within that folder are recorded by the FIM tool. Similarly, when the audit permission settings are enabled for a file, access attempts to read, write, copy, and paste a file are audited by the FIM tool.
Conversely, when the audit permission settings are disabled for files and folders, none of the activities can be tracked by the FIM tool, thereby allowing malicious file changes to go undetected. Therefore, ensuring that file audit permission settings are enabled for all critical files is crucial to safeguard the confidentiality and integrity of data.
4. Regulate file access controls
File access controls or file permissions determine the level to which a file can be accessed by a particular user. The access controls are generally assigned to users by the file owner. The different levels of access include read access, write access, share permissions, copy and paste permissions, and ownership permissions. By assigning ownership permissions to a user, file owners can enable the user to avail all levels of controls.
In cases where ownership permissions are assigned to malicious users, insiders can disable the ownership of the original owner, making the file inaccessible and unavailable to other users. Thus, to regulate file permissions, assessing user credibility before assigning highly privileged permissions is crucial.
5. Monitor user-centric file activities
The Insider Threat Report 2023 by Cybersecurity Insiders states that 74% of organizations are vulnerable to insider threats. Malicious insiders compromise privileged user accounts to gain unauthorized access to sensitive files. They may then tamper with data, manipulate it, or exfiltrate it to external locations, impacting data security and privacy.
This makes monitoring user-centric file activities like unauthorized file access, file changes, and permission changes essential to maintain the integrity of sensitive data. Integrating a user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) tool with FIM can help you track anomalous user activities and assign risk scores based on their behavior. These risk scores further assist you in assessing the credibility of the user before assigning high-level file permissions.
6. Ensure proactive threat detection
Proactive threat detection and alerting are imperative to stay ahead of file integrity threats. Receiving file change notifications when anomalous file activities take place helps you detect potential data breach incidents in real time. However, this process is often accompanied by the generation of false positive alerts that impact alert triaging, leading to alert fatigue in SOC teams.
Therefore, it is crucial for a FIM tool to auto-promote expected file activities and distinguish between anticipated and anomalous file changes with predefined correlation rules and alert profiles. This can help validate the generated alerts and ensure proactive threat detection in real time.
7. Establish a reactive incident response
Monitoring unauthorized file changes and generating alerts is the end goal of traditional file monitoring. But today, with excessive false positives and alert fatigue, a reactive incident response mechanism is eminent for FIM to defend against potential data breach incidents. Thus, establishing an automated incident response mechanism with predefined workflows prevents potential data breach incidents from propagation.
8. Choose a user-friendly and scalable FIM tool
There are several factors that need to be considered before choosing a FIM solution, among which complexity and scalability are the most crucial aspects. Traditional FIM solutions are generally complex and involve complications when configuring devices.
For example, in enterprise networks with a multitude of assets, there is a limitation on the number of assets that can be configured under traditional FIM. This renders traditional FIM tools useless in meeting the data security demands of next-gen networks. Therefore, choosing a light-weight and easily scalable FIM tool is a critical decision. You may want to check out this page on how to choose FIM software to gain better clarity on the important features to look for in a FIM tool.
9. Integrate FIM with other security solutions
Integrating FIM tools with solutions like security information and event management (SIEM); security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR); and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) can provide a holistic approach to data integrity threats by correlating and detecting anomalies, and offering automated responses. For this, the FIM tool should include built-in APIs and allow integrations to facilitate communication with other security solutions.
10. Conduct user awareness training
Education of users and employees regarding the significance of data security is essential for safeguarding organizational data. Creating awareness among users of insider threats that escalate via phishing emails and social engineering attacks is important to ensure personal data privacy.
Additionally, it is important to mandate adherence to password policies, such as creating strong passwords, utilizing password vaults, and enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent account compromises and privilege escalations. By following these practices, users can actively contribute to maintaining the integrity and privacy of sensitive data.
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ManageEngine Log360 is a FIM-integrated SIEM solution that can help your organization ensure file integrity and data security. It equips your network with 360-degree threat detection to defend against data integrity attacks. If you would like to learn more, sign up for a personalized demo or try a free, 30-day trial of Log360 now!
