Policy Change Event: 856

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The Who, Where and When information is very important for an administrator to have complete knowledge of all activities that occur on their Active Directory. This helps them identify any desired / undesired activity happening. ADAudit Plus assists an administrator with this information in the form of reports. In real-time, ensure critical resources in the network like the Domain Controllers are audited, monitored and reported with the entire information on AD objects - Users, Groups, GPO, Computer, OU, DNS, AD Schema and Configuration changes with 200+ detailed event specific GUI reports and email alerts.

Process Tracking » Policy Change Event: 856

Event ID 856 – The Windows Firewall setting to allow unicast responses to multicast/broadcast traffic has changed.

Event ID 856
Category Policy Change
Type Success Audit

When the Windows Firewall settings for allowing unicast responses to multicast or broadcast traffic are changed, event ID 856 is logged by Windows. Such a change is usually instituted by an administrator or a group policy refresh.

This log data provides the following information:

  • Policy Origin
  • Profile Changed
  • New Settings
  • Old Settings

Why does event ID 856 need to be monitored?

All changes with regards to Windows Firewall need to be monitored as unplanned or unauthorized changes need immediate investigation. It could be a sign of malicious activity.

Pro Tip:

ADAudit Plus helps you avoid the GPOs monitoring complexities with real-time pre-configured reports and auditing of the changes along with alerts within a Domain & OU. The advanced Group Policy settings real-time audit reports highlight the elusive change details, and also provide the old and new values of the modified attributes.

Event 856 applies to the following operating systems:

  • Windows 2003 and XP

Corresponding event ID in Windows 2008 and Windows Vista is 4950.

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