In this article, learn more about file integrity monitoring, and see how it works and the basic steps.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. With the world changing rapidly the data and the system that controls the data are also changing. At the beginning of the Internet and WWW, the data used to be stored on one’s personal machine, and it was accessed by only the person owning the device. But now, with thousands of companies working with millions of employees and billions of terabytes of data, it is necessary to control and monitor who is going to access the data and who is going to made changes in it. And this is where file integrity monitoring comes into play. File integrity monitoring is simply the technique to keep the watch of the data, who is going to access the data, who has made changes in the data, and how the data has been changed. To understand the process easily let us first break down the term. Here file means data. Keeping the integrity of the data means protecting the data from any foreign changes. And Monitoring means watching the data closely to know whether the integrity of data is maintained or not. Let’s take one example. You run a company that provides your user with cloud space for storing their files. The way your company work is you give your user access to some storage in your server and only that user can put their file in that space nobody else has access to that space. But you found out that your server is been hit by a cyber-attack. Now you know that your system is hit but don’t know where exactly it has been attacked by hackers because you have thousands of users using thousands of gigabytes of space for storage on your server. In this situation, if your system is installed with file integrity monitoring software you can easily find out where your system is hit and what changes have been made in your system.
