Quite a few times in this blog we’ve talked about automating audit and assessment tasks, especially as it relates to system baselines. We’ve tried quite a few times to give our readers tools for creating baselines and always hope that people will turn those baselines into automated processes that will alert them to deviations or changes to their systems.
Certainly one way to do this is via commercial products. Many companies have purchased file integrity assessment toolkits, such as those by Tripwire, in order to help automate this process. Others have turned to lower cost mechanisms such as scripting tools to do the same thing, although maybe not as elegantly.
In doing a little reading online at the Microsoft Script Center, I found a nice case study who decided to use scripting to accomplish their automation goals. Ben Wilkinson from Microsoft posted a series of blog articles where he describes the process of automating and alerting on changes to group memberships using Microsoft scripting technologies. Here’s a link to the full set of articles:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/655180ff-6236-4718-8dee-0f5b9b4a1f06
I think it’s worth highlighting and applauding efforts like this. If you aren’t already using an automated process like this to assist you with your continuous audit efforts, hopefully you can receive some inspiration from what Ben has posted here. Thanks Ben for the posts.