Azure provides a wide array of configurable security auditing and logging options to help you identify gaps in your security policies and mechanisms. This article discusses generating, collecting, and analyzing security logs from services hosted on Azure.
Note
Certain recommendations in this article might result in increased data, network, or compute resource usage, and increase your license or subscription costs.
Cloud applications are complex with many moving parts. Logging data can provide insights about your applications and help you:
Troubleshoot past problems or prevent potential ones
Improve application performance or maintainability
Automate actions that would otherwise require manual intervention
Azure logs are categorized into the following types:
Control/management logs provide information about Azure Resource Manager CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations. For more information, see Azure activity logs.
Data plane logs provide information about events raised as part of Azure resource usage. Examples of this type of log are the Windows event system, security, and application logs in a virtual machine (VM) and the diagnostics logs that are configured through Azure Monitor.
Processed events provide information about analyzed events/alerts that have been processed on your behalf. Examples of this type are Microsoft Defender for Cloud alerts where Microsoft Defender for Cloud has processed and analyzed your subscription and provides concise security alerts.
The following table lists the most important types of logs available in Azure:
Microsoft Defender for Cloud alerts, Azure Monitor logs alerts
Provides security information and alerts.
REST APIs, JSON
Log integration with on-premises SIEM systems
Integrating Defender for Cloud alerts discusses how to sync Defender for Cloud alerts, virtual machine security events collected by Azure diagnostics logs, and Azure audit logs with your Azure Monitor logs or SIEM solution.
Next steps
Auditing and logging: Protect data by maintaining visibility and responding quickly to timely security alerts.
Configure audit settings for a site collection: If you're a site collection administrator, retrieve the history of individual users' actions and the history of actions taken during a particular date range.
Whereas regular system logs are designed to help developers troubleshoot errors, audit logs help organizations document a historical record of activity for compliance purposes and other business policy enforcement.
To enable audit logs in diagnostic logging, select your Azure Data Manager for Energy instance in the Azure portal. Currently, you can enable audit logs for OSDU Core Services, Seismic DMS, Petrel Data Services, and Wellbore DMS. Select the Activity log screen, and then select Diagnostic settings.
Azure Monitor Logs is a centralized software as a service (SaaS) platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry data generated by Azure and non-Azure resources and applications.
However, auditing and logging differ in how they process, store, and use that information. Auditing focuses on analyzing and evaluating the information for security and compliance purposes, while logging focuses on recording and preserving the information for performance and operational purposes.
An audit tests that the alarm actually works.A security audit is a substantial and formal review of your systems and processes. Not only does it look at your physical infrastructure (networks, firewalls etc.), but it also looks at things like policy and operating procedures.
Azucar: Security auditing tool for Azure environments. ...
BloodHound: BloodHound uses graph theory to reveal hidden relationships and attack paths in an Active Directory environment that would otherwise be impossible to quickly identify.
The Azure equivalent of AWS CloudTrail is Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor is a monitoring service that provides data and insights from Azure resources, applications, and services. It includes a log analytics service that allows you to collect, search, and analyze log data from your Azure resources.
The $logs container is located in the blob namespace of the storage account, for example: http://<accountname>.blob.core.windows.net/$logs . This container cannot be deleted once Storage Analytics has been enabled, though its contents can be deleted.
Examples of security software logs include (non-exhaustive): Antivirus; intrusion prevention system; vulnerability management; authentication servers; firewalls; routers. Examples of operating systems and application logs include (non-exhaustive): System events; audit records.
Basic and Auxiliary logs tables reduce the cost of ingesting high-volume verbose logs and let you query the data they store with some limitations. This article explains how to query data from Basic and Auxiliary logs tables.
The Azure portal provides access to the audit log events in your Azure AD B2C tenant. Sign in to the Azure portal. Switch to the directory that contains your Azure AD B2C tenant, and then browse to Azure AD B2C. Under Activities in the left menu, select Audit logs.
To enable application logging for Windows apps in the Azure portal, navigate to your app and select App Service logs. Select On for either Application Logging (Filesystem) or Application Logging (Blob), or both. The Filesystem option is for temporary debugging purposes, and turns itself off in 12 hours.
Diagnostic logs provide insights on the operations that were performed within a resource. With Microsoft Azure's diagnostic logs, you can export basic usage metrics from content delivery network (CDN) endpoints to a variety of sources.
Difference between audit logs and regular system logs
While both audit logs and system logs record events and actions, they serve distinct purposes: Audit Logs capture who did what, where, and when. They are primarily used for compliance, security, and computer forensic investigations.
A security audit focuses on assessing an organisation's security policies and controls according to predefined criteria, while security testing focuses on identifying vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a system's defence through simulated attacks.
System logs contain events logged by the operating system, such as driver issues during startup. Security logs contain events related to security, such as login attempts, object access, and file deletion. Administrators determine which events to log, in accordance with their audit policy.
Compared to activity logs, audit logs have multiple log name values and different payload values. Audit log entries also return fully qualified resource names and versioned method names.
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