Florida Department of Transportation (FDoT)

Florida Department of Transportation uses ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer for Privileged User Monitoring and Auditing (PUMA)

The Customer

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDoT) is a government organization. The department was formed in 1969 and is responsible for the establishment, maintenance, and regulation of public transportation in the state of Florida. Under the department there are seven districts and Florida's Turnpike Enterprise. The Central Office is situated at Tallahassee and has 7000+ employees statewide.

The Challenges

The Office of Information System (OIS), FDoT handles thousands of users comprising of employees, consultants and contractors. The challenge faced by the FDoT was, grant of Administrator privilege going unnoticed and there was no mechanism in place to notify the Network Security Analyst when such an incident happened.

Adhering to the IT policy of the department is very relevant in keeping the IT network of the enterprise secured. As per the IT policy of the department not all the users are authorized for Administrator privileges. The department had a process in place to grant Administrator access privileges to individual users. But few of the privileged users themselves were inadvertently granting the privilege to unauthorized users. FDoT could not visualize the security implications of such inadvertent action.

As a large organization, FDoT generates huge quantities of log data, and the office was finding it tough to keep a track on activities happening on their IT network. The office needed an effective way to collect, analyze and process the log data for compliance and security purposes. There was no automated solution to collect and analyze the huge volume of logs. The IT department was facing a mammoth task of analyzing the logs manually. Also, FDoT wanted to maintain unique electronic records, generate reports and send real-time notifications during events such as adding new users, deleting users, creating/deleting user objects from a number of domain controllers.

FDoT was looking for a solution which would alert the network security analyst in real-time for any policy violations and to manage the huge amount of log data for compliance and security purposes.

Solution

After a thorough review of all available products in the market, ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer was selected by the Office of Information System (OIS), FDoT.

EventLog Analyzer was selected for a number of factors:

EventLog Analyzer could capture the events instantly and notify the Security Analyst in real-time with various means like Email, SMS & also has a provision to run custom scripts.

"EventLog Analyzer has a user friendly interface and this really makes it easy to add new hosts, establish host groups, setup alerts and get reports. It's pretty straight forward and minimizes the headache of eventlog reporting." says Joseph Veretto, Computer Security Analyst, FDoT.

EventLog Analyzer also fulfilled the requirement to maintain unique electronic records for every activity happening in the network such as adding new users, deleting users, creating /deleting user objects, etc.

The security analyst is now notified when an user is granted administrator privileges and now can provide his management with necessary IT Process compliance reports. This helped the Analyst to take appropriate remedial action to the incident. The Analyst was able to enforce the IT policy to secure the IT network.

EventLog Analyzer is best in class automated log management solution, making the work of the Security expert easy. Manually impossible task of analyzing huge volume log data was made possible with EventLog Analyzer. The security analyst could now take charge of the massive log data and analyze it automatically. All events in the IT network were captured and analyzed by EventLog Analyzer and the data was presented in form of reports and graphs.

With EventLog Analyzer, FDoT stays compliant with different regulatory bodies and the Security Analyst is alerted in real-time when there is any suspicious activity happening on the IT network.

"EventLog Analyzer has been a good event log reporting and alerting solution for our information technology needs. It minimizes the amount of time we spent on filtering through event logs and provides almost near real-time notification of administratively defined alerts."
Joseph Veretto
Computer Security Analyst
Florida Department of Transportation