Oklahoma City is using technology that not only watches for signs of any hacker activity on its municipal government network, but monitors employee online behavior to assure no one's going out of bounds.
"We wanted to be able to respond to intrusions," says Tom Barnum, security engineer for Oklahoma City, about the main reason the city deployed the Prism Microsystems security information and event management (SIEM) product EventTracker about two years ago. But the city government is also finding it to be a way to follow what employees, including IT staff, do via their computers online and have city managers step in when need be.
BEST PRACTICES: SIEM deployment
The Prism SIEM client software "keeps track of all the events on the machine, log-in and log-out times, and it has the ability to track programs," Barnum says. SIEM has become a tool for gauging "employee malfeasance," that might mean anything from trying to access something they shouldn't or wasting time with unauthorized applications.
Oklahoma City has established procedures, some via automated alerts, where city managers can be immediately informed electronically about misbehavior. This spares the IT department from having to directly play the policing role.
SIEM can also keep track of whether certain records are changed. And on the IT administrative side, where only certain workers have access to machines like police computers, if someone gets dropped or added, an alert is sent out right away.
While the Prism SIEM can make many determinations on its own, the IT security staff still has to plow through raw data at times to interpret what's going on, Barnum says. For instance, new activity on the municipal network, such as when the city started a migration to Windows 7, will send up the "noise level" and require another round of SIEM "tuning".
Although it's a powerful security tool, there are some limitations with Prism's SIEM offering, according to Barnum. For one thing, it faces challenges monitoring over wireless networks due to bandwidth constraints. Also, "EventTracker is not geared toward high-speed searching," Barnum says. Some intensive searches into stored log and event data "can take a week" and although the latest version is an improvement, "it's still not a system getting rolling-fast searches."
Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.