Mastering Risk Assessment and Security Audits

Mastering Risk Assessment and Security Audits with Morro Audit

Before diving into the auditing process, it’s essential to understand why a security audit is crucial. A security audit helps identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations. It provides a comprehensive overview of your organization’s security posture, allowing you to proactively address potential threats.

What’s a Security Audit?

A security audit is like a check-up for a company’s computer systems and rules to find and understand any problems that could make the company’s data and technology less safe. The primary goal of a security audit is to ensure that an organization’s assets, including data, technology, and processes, are adequately protected against potential security threats and risks. Security audits are essential for maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA Triad) of sensitive information and for ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards.

Initiating the Audit Process: Identifying Assets and Risk Assessment

Embarking on the audit journey involves listing and identifying assets within your organization. The assets may include:

• On-premises equipment for in-office business needs
• Internet access
• Internal network
• Management of systems (servers), software, and services: accounting, finance, database, security, e-commerce, and supply chain management
• Employee equipment: end-user devices (desktops/laptops), remote workstations, cables, keyboards, docking stations, surveillance cameras
• Data storage
• Legacy system maintenance

Leveraging Morro Audit for User Activity Tracking

During the audit phase, Morro Audit plays a pivotal role, seamlessly facilitating the process by continuously monitoring and recording activities. Through this, Morro Audit generates detailed audit logs, and interpreting these logs becomes essential for gaining insights into user behaviors and system events. Admins can leverage Morro Audit to track user activities, gain insights into account access patterns, and thereby identify irregularities and potential security threats.

To review a user’s sessions and file activities, Admin may utilize the Audit Sessions and Events page. The Sessions page provides a comprehensive view of system connections, with each session encompassing a series of events that are accessible on the Events page. On the Events page, users can explore and monitor the activities associated with files and folders within a specific share.

Mitigating Security Gaps 

As the audit unfolds, our journey takes us to the task of addressing security gaps and coming up with a plan to fix any issues we find. Admins, using the Morro Cloud Manager, adjust share/folder/device access controls and MFA settings. We also make sure disaster recovery is up to snuff. Morro Audit keeps us in the loop with real-time alerts, helping us quickly tackle any security gaps we come across.