I get the question fairly often, how to use the logon events in the audit log to track how long a user was using their computer and when they logged off. As I have written about previously, this method of user activity tracking is unreliable . It works...

I spent some time a while back analyzing logs, figuring out what you can do with group policy auditing on Windows Server 2003. I did not test Windows 2000; I suspect that much of this applies but YMMV. GP editing does leave an auditable trail of directory...

So a long time ago, back in my days of providing technical support for Windows NT 4.0, I published " Security Event Descriptions ". This article was the "schema" so to speak, for the Windows NT 4.0 security event log events. Technically Windows events...

A question I get asked frequently: what are the default ACLs on Windows event logs? Here's the answer, straight from the source code with only a little formatting help from me, and in more detail than you probably care to know. Windows 2000: ...

One of the most common questions that I get about Windows Auditing is, how come you guys were so @#%! stupid that you put in two logon categories? The answer is actually pretty simple- we're bad at choosing names. "Account Logon" isn't really about...

[2011-04-11] This post was updated to indicate the interaction between these recommendations and the granular audit policy settings which are available in Windows Vista and subsequent releases. EF I commonly hear the complaint that "there's too much...

Logon events. Event 528 and Event 540 are the Logon events. Event 528 is for all logons except "network" logons. "Network" logons are SMB/Microsoft-DS logons (i.e. connecting to a share). RDP, IIS, FTP logons, etc., are event 528 even though credentials...

If you haven't used wevtutil.exe to script event log tasks in Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, you're missing out. The new tool makes getting events out of the log pretty easy, but the main thing is that it doesn't suffer from any of the drawbacks...

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge the information here is correct. However the lawyers make me say, that this information is provided "AS-IS" with no warranty, and confers no rights. In other words, if this stuff isn't in SP1, you can't sue us,...

A lot of you guys probably are using your SEM/SEIM systems to record logon and logoff activity without much of a second thought. I just thought I'd bring one problem to your attention. Logoff events are not strictly reliable. From an engineering...

A lot of people are unhappy with object access auditing on Windows, because what they want to know is "who touched the object and what did that person do", but what Windows auditing tells you is actually "who touched the object and what did they ask for...

I wrote this as an answer for Tom, who emailed me, but I thought I'd share it with everyone. There are 7 events associated with object access auditing in Windows: 560 is the "open handle" event. It is logged when an app asks for access to...

Fadi, Ned and Brian of the auditing team have documented all the auditing events by audit policy category and subcategory for your reference. Check it out in the Knowledge Base . Even better, they documented all the events in spreadsheet format...

Mitsuru, one of our support engineers in Japan, actually did some excellent research recently into exactly what our behavior is for auditing audit policy and I wanted to share that with you. In Windows, we've always had auditing for changes to security...

I've decided to start dumping my knowledge of ACS for posterity's sake. My first installment is here, and it's an excerpt from an external email I put together which describes how event transformation works on ACS. Transformation is performed on...

I've written before on noise reduction in the Windows security event log. I've also written to describe how object access auditing works . But, I still get questions on how to reduce noise from object access events. The other day I got that question,...

Today I encountered something new in the logon event- I thought that was old hat and I knew all there was to know about that but I guess I was wrong. The logon event ( 528/540 prior to Windows Vista, 4624 in Vista and Windows Server 2008) has a field...

Odd thing today- I got two questions about the obscure " FullPrivilegeAuditing " registry setting- so I thought I'd post my answer. Some of this is not new, I posted on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 changes to auditing a while back. Events ID 577 and...

Doriansoft noticed that there's a relationship between our pre-Vista security event IDs and our Vista-era security event IDs. For most security events: VistaEventId = PreVistaEventId + 4096 Why is this? We needed to differentiate the Vista events...

I'm hearing lots of complaints that we don't have KB articles on these yet. Doriansoft has a blog post complaining that the " add 4096 " rule doesn't work because we collapsed the logon events into a single success event and failure event (from 2 success...

This blog is dedicated to those folks who've Google'd for Windows security event information and found newsgroup posts that I've made in the past. I feel your pain. "Windows Auditing" is what we call the security logging feature of the Windows OS. In...

I got the question last week, why there are so many logon failure events on Windows XP when it is not domain joined. The short answer is, by design. (Yes, bad design.) The longer answer is that the shell team is working around the fact that there...

From time to time I hear this, and it usually turns out not to be the case. I'll begin with a little background. First, The eventlog service does not have (and never did have) any public or private API to delete individual events- there is a log clear...

Have you ever wanted a record of admin activity regarding service management? For example, who stopped one of your services? Did you know that you can do this through auditing? It's actually really easy. The "Security Templates" MMC snap-in allows...

I often get the question, how do I allow a group of auditors read access to my security logs without making them admins and without letting them clear the logs? To answer this, first you need to know, for what version of Windows? Prior to Windows Server...