After grappling with our company's compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley, I've come to the conclusion that retail store owners could teach us security professionals a thing or two about network security.

Today we attempt to secure the network perimeter by reviewing the numerous related logs generated by our firewalls, IDSs, IPSs, VPNs, and other security appliances. The problem is that reviewing all those logs turns out to be untenable. There are just so many hours in a day, and a single firewall log can fill up with several million events in that time. It's simply a mistake to assume a human can actually browse through all those events and find most anomalies. You might catch obvious patterns such as exceptional event volume caused by a worm, but to say you're reviewing logs is more an attempt at compliance than security.

By Stuart Berman at IT Architect

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