It is a sad, if well-known fact that the majority of security breaches in any business are the work of insiders. This is as true for IT security breaches as any other area, and finding out what has happened and who did it can be a tricky problem.

One answer is to be able to audit the activity of trusted users within a business, so it becomes possible to track not only who has had access to what application, but also what activities took place. This is the goal of the Application Auditing solution from Compuware, which is capable of providing detailed forensic information and audit reports. The toolset is based on the company’s Hiperstation mainframe security system, which is directly integrated with the mainframe operating system. Heavy transaction loads can be accommodated in this way, with some Hiperstation claimed to have recorded more than eight million transactions per day.

The company has indicated that, prior to the formalization of Application Auditing as an offering some of the tools have already been used to provide audit-based evidence in legal proceedings. ®