Shell Control Box
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Application areas and typical end-users
Policy compliance:
Certain regulations - such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), EU 8. Directive - require the financial director of an organization to certify that all financial data they provide to the authorities is accurate and has not been modified. Other industries have similar regulations (like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or the Payment Card Industry (PCI) about protecting personal or credit card information. Such data is usually stored in a database on a central server, and is accessible only via dedicated applications, such as accounting software. These applications always create the logs and reports necessary for policy compliance. However, these applications are aware only of legitimate accesses to the database. The server storing the database has to be accessible also by server administrators for maintenance reasons. Having superuser privileges on the server, these administrators have the possibility to directly access and manipulate the database, and also to erase the traces of such actions from the server logs. However, SCB can audit the actions of the administrators, complementing the logs and reports of other applications.
Organizations having outsourced IT:
Many organizations hire external companies to configure, maintain, and oversee their servers and IT services. This essentially means that the organization is willing to trust the administrators of this external company with all their data (e.g.: private and business e-mails, customer information, etc.), or even with business-critical services like the operation of their online shop. Obviously, in such situations it is reassuring to have an independent device that can reliably log all administrative activities. SCB does exactly this - it provides detailed information about any problems with the server, making it easy to find those responsible.
Organizations offering remote management:
Organizations on the other end of the outsourcing line - like server- and webhosting companies - can equally benefit from SCB. It gives them the possibility to oversee and audit the administrators, and is also a great tool to evaluate their effectiveness. The recorded audit trails can also be used as evidence to settle any issues about the remotely administered servers.
Security experts creating honeypot systems:
The transparent auditing capabilities of SCB make it ideal to create honeypot systems. All actions performed by the attacker on the remote server can be logged, without giving him a chance to manipulate or erase the logs.
