Monitoring Mission Critical Data for Integrity and Availability

Protecting the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of mission critical data is one of the primary objectives shared among security/risk management and IT departments in various vertical industries, government, and research. Standard techniques to realize these objectives are often confined to network and host-based intrusion detection systems, which are known to be inappropriate for handling security threats caused by insiders. This paper introduces the concept of data content, metadata and privilege monitoring systems as an additional line of defense against external and internal security threats. These systems, which are closely coupled with a database managing mission critical data, provide security/risk management and IT personnel with effective means for specifying, detecting, and responding to anomalous behavior of data and data accesses caused by users and applications.