Today I received a phone call from one of our clients who had read my previous blog: “How to Benefit from Monitoring Good Web Activity”. This blog is focused on how you can benefit from monitoring internet activity that is not generally perceived as bad, or unproductive. The client, a network administrator at a large government department, wanted to share his experience from such a monitoring situation.
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Posts Tagged ‘Log File Analysis’
How to Educate your Workforce and Strengthen Security with Internet Monitoring
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Convert Microsoft ISA 2006 MSDE logs to WebSpy compatible text logs
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Some customers have experienced issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text using Microsoft’s MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006 (available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=23531736-942f-466c-acb3-861a899d37b4&displaylang=en)
If you convert your logs to text using this script, they won’t import into WebSpy Vantage or Analyzer due to an extra line break in the header of the file (after #fields:).
We’ve therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.
Download the modified MSDEToText script:
MSDEToText.zip -26 KB
Also make sure the file names of your output log files contain the word WEB (for Web Proxy logs) or FWS (for Firewall Logs) as Analyzer and Vantage use these strings to automatically detect the type of ISA log file.
Happy converting!
Unlocking the Value of your Log Data. 10 tips to help you get started
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
This is a popular WebSpy article that we decided to re-post. Click here to download pdf version.
What can log data do for you?
Organisations today are deploying a variety of security solutions to counter the ever increasing threat to their email and Internet investments. Often, the emergence of new threats spawns solutions by different companies with a niche or a specialty for that specific threat – whether it is a guard against viruses, spam, intrusion detection, Spyware, data leakage or any of the other segments within the security landscape.
This heterogeneous security environment means that there has been a proliferation of log data generated by the various systems or devices. As the number of different log formats increases coupled with the sheer volume of log data, the more difficult it becomes for organisations to turn this data into meaningful business information. (more…)
WebSpy: The Origin and Controversy of the Name
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
The year was 1996 and young(ish) CEO, Jack Andrys, was racking his brain to come up with the perfect name for his business. It was the early stage of the Internet evolution with a shy number of 36 million users, 0.9% of the population. Not much compared to today’s staggering number of 1,596 million users, 23.8% of the population.
The concern for Internet misuse and costly drawbacks in the business arena were gradually rising and proactive Jack could already visualize an increasing need to monitor organizational web resources. Back then the software focused solely on analyzing and reporting on log files produced by proxy servers. Names such as Proxy Analyzer, Log File Reporter, Proxy Log Hog and Web Analyzer entered Jack’s brain but were quickly dismissed. He needed something better, something with more impact, a name that would draw attention, a descriptive name without the dullness, one name that could encompass the software’s functionality and create a conceptual understanding of what the company was all about….one name to rule them all…
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