File activity monitoring (FAM) includes two major components. The first component discovers and classifies files stored in the file system, and the second component is the activity monitor. It extracts the security policy from the appliance and enforces it on file activity in real time. 

In this lab, you view the settings necessary to perform file access monitoring, create a dashboard and add a file entitlement report, and then perform some file operations to view how the FAM functionality reacts to changes.

Franklin Almonte, Guardium 10.5

In this video, Vlad Langman, L3 Engineering Manager, discusses best practices for upgrading to Guardium 11.

The Guardium Vulnerability Assessment application enables organizations to identify and address database vulnerabilities in a consistent and automated fashion. The assessment process in Guardium evaluates and recommends actions to improve the health of your database environment. In this lab, you learn how to configure and run a database vulnerability assessment.

This lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Franklin Almonte

In this video, you learn how to configure the Guardium archive.

Guardium 10.5 includes an ecosystem to extend and enhance your current Guardium deployment with new capabilities. Guardium apps are the centerpiece of the ecosystem, allowing you to augment and enrich your current Guardium system. You can create your own Guardium apps or download and install shared apps created by IBM, business partners, or other Guardium customers.

In this tech talk, John Haldeman from Information Insights will share his experiences using the Guardium Ecosystem and demonstrate how to:

- Create a Guardium app using the Software Development Kit (SDK)

- Deploy your app on your Guardium appliance

- Share your app on the IBM Guardium App Exchange

Join the IBM Security Learning Services team for an in-depth tour of the Security Learning Academy, with a focus on IBM Security Guardium course offerings. In this video, you will see how to navigate the platform, search the course catalog, enroll in a course, view your enrollments on your dashboard, create progress reports, and see how Security Learning Academy is integrated with IBM VIP Rewards for Security.

Guardium provides over 600 preconfigured reports. As well as being useful in themselves, these reports can serve as templates to create a report customized to your specific needs. This saves time and effort. In this course, you clone a Guardium query. Then, you customize the fields and conditions of this query and generate a report from the new query.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Lou Fuka

Guardium File Activity Monitoring provides tools to discover, classify, and build policies for files. In this lab, you use the Quick Search GUI window to find files that contain sensitive information, select a set of these files, and create a policy that monitors attempts to access these files.

This lab is useful for Guardium users and administrators who need to monitor access to files that contain sensitive information. The lab is based on Guardium version 10.5.

Guardium gathers a large amount of data about your database environment. You use reports and queries to learn the details of your data security environment. In this virtual lab, you create a dashboard, simple query, and report that is used to examine user data you generate.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Franklin Almonte

Using IBM Guardium, you can create policies to monitor access to unstructured data, such as that found in files, as well as structured data, such as that found in databases. In this lab, you learn how to create and install policies to monitor files. Then you modify the FAM policy and add a rule that prevents a group of users from copying a file.

Guardium contains a powerful tool that links related reports. Users can click report entries and view a list of other reports that provide more granular information related to the entry. In this lab, you create a drill-down report to extend the capabilities of existing reports. Then, you test your new report.

This lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

A policy is a key component of data security. To keep your data secure, you must be able to implement rules on how data access is monitored, logged, and controlled.  In this course, you will learn how to create, install, and update IBM Guardium policies on data access.

Guardium Data Security policies help flag suspicious database activity. When you configure policy rules to ignore trusted database activity, you can reduce the load on the network and Guardium managed units. In this  lab, you create a policy with rules to discard trusted activity and flag untrusted activity.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Guardium 10.1.4 includes a new group builder application that  provides powerful tools you can use to add users to a group  and review  which resources use a given group. In this course, you learn to how to build and populate Guardium groups.

Louis Fuka

This video demonstrates the process of deploying the Guardium external S-TAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in order to monitor AWS cloud databases with Guardium.

Guardium S-TAP is a lightweight software agent installed on database servers. S-TAP agents collect the data that are used by traffic reports, alerts, and visualizations. S-TAP agents also enact certain policy rules.

In this lab, you install the S-TAP agent on a database server using the Guardium Installation Manager (GIM) and Guardium GUI.

Author: Franklin Almonte

This IBM Redbooks® publication provides a guide for deploying the Guardium solutions.

This book also provides a roadmap process for implementing an InfoSphere Guardium solution that is based on years of experience and best practices that were collected from various Guardium experts. We describe planning, installation, configuration, monitoring, and administrating an InfoSphere Guardium environment. We also describe use cases and how InfoSphere Guardium integrates with other IBM products.

Guardium data security policies help flag suspicious database activity and events. In this virtual lab, you create a policy that will detect and alert on database login failures that occur multiple times over a short time period.

Franklin Almonte

This video provides an example of installing a Guardium GPU patch; highlighting good practices and tips for the install.

In this video, you learn how to enable IP-to-Hostname alias mapping.

The IBM Guardium 11 active threat analytics dashboard shows potential security breach cases, based on the outlier mining process and on identified attack symptoms. In this video, you see how to use the dashboard to view cases, investigate them, and take action.

Guardium 10.x includes functionality you can use to monitor file activity. In this course, you view the discovery and classification capabilities of the file activity monitoring (FAM) tools and learn how to set up a blocking rule to prevent someone from deleting files in a directory and logs the attempt. You also learn how to create and install policies to monitor files.

It is easy to use the predefined alerts in Guardium. In this course, you to learn about the different Guardium alert types and how to use them to monitor your Guardium ecosystem.

Policy actions are key components of Guardium polices and are critical to policy strategy and tuning. This interactive video introduces you to common blocking actions, alerting actions, and logging actions. It also includes general tips about using policy rule actions.

Franklin Almonte

Starting with version 10.6, Guardium has a new policy builder. This builder incorporates many of the 10.x design features, including a format that presents configuration options as sections, and an intuitive, step-by-step guide to create and configure the policy.

Franklin Almonte

Guardium 11 introduces Policy Analyzer, which provides rule counts for installed Data Access Management (DAM) policy rules.

IBM Guardium 11 introduces risk spotter, a semi-automatic process that hones in on the most risky users and the most risky databases. This dynamic risk assessment considers all risk factors, including but not limited to: outliers, vulnerability, volume of activities, access to sensitive data, type of commands (privileges). It scans unmonitored users and databases beyond your current policies to spot previously unmonitored risks, and it suggests proactive actions.

In Guardium 11, the smart assistant for compliance monitoring helps you quickly configure monitoring for GDPR, PCI, SOX, and other security standards by automating policy installation and scheduling, populating policy groups, discovering sensitive data in your databases, and more.

This video presents a deep dive with a Use Case and supporting screen shots showing how to use the functionality of Smart Assistant.  

This Tech Talk focuses on one of the many key features of Guardium 11, integration with CyberArk for managing user names and passwords, as well as, enhancements for managing data sources and groups. 

The Guardium 11 Vulnerability Assessment (VA) has many new features, including test exceptions, test detail exceptions, security assessment using datasource group, CyberArk integration, DataStax Cassandra, as well as support for the new release of MongoDB 4.0, PostgreSQLv11 and Oracle 18c CVE tests.

IBM Guardium policy rules fall into three categories:

• Access rules
• Extrusion rules
• Exception rules

In this video series, you  learn about the three types of rules , what criteria and actions are associated with each type, and some of the uses for each type of rule.

In this Open Mic video, Avi Walerius from Guardium Technical Support discusses different aspects of appliance patches: differences between patch types, advice on the health check patch, and best practices for installing GPU patches.

This Guardium Open Mic discusses the usage of ATAP and EXIT. ATAP allows interception of encrypted traffic at the database server application level, and EXIT functionality makes it possible to intercept any traffic while eliminating the need for loading the KTAP module into the kernel.

Learn how IBM Security Guardium supports IBM's approach to data-centric audit and protection.

Guardium Big Data Intelligence complements existing Guardium deployments with the ability to quickly integrate an optimized security data lake.

Part 1 covers architecture, reporting, and data retention.

New in IBM Guardium 10.6, alerts are sent when the system predicts that a DB size or files on disk (/var) will reach 50% in the next 14 days. Alerts detail the predicted size and the largest tables or files. Alerts are also shown in the deployment health dashboard of the central manager.  In this course, you will see a quick overview of this feature and then a deeper dive into the function and its architecture.

In this video, you will learn how IBM Guardium supports monitoring capabilities for Database as a Service (DBaaS) and containerized databases, offering a consistent approach to data protection for on-premise and cloud environments.

The IBM DB2 for z/OS platform stores mission critical data for companies. In this overview, you will learn how IBM Security Guardium can help monitor, audit, and protect DB2 z/OS environments.  Topics include best practices and approaches to protect your data using Guardium for DB2 z/OS S-TAP features and capabilities, and troubleshooting.

The information in this Open Mic will help keep you out of trouble and possibly rescue you in the case of full appliance issues.

Agenda:

• Introduction
• Detection
• First Response
• Getting to Root Cause
• Questions & Answers

In the follow-up to the Open Mic, John spends time answering audience questions on that and other topics.

• Reboot the appliance
• Issues with fixes
• Vulnerabilities
• The Discovery engine
• High CPU
  

In this video, you will see the steps to create an IBM Guardium instance in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In this video, you will see how to set up an IBM Guardium instance in Microsoft Azure.

The central reporting of activity of database activity monitoring systems is measured against the problem of huge amounts of data and the necessity of long data retention that is enforced by regulations, and correct identification of anomalies in user behavior through quantitative analysis.

IBM Security Guardium Insights (GI) is a response to these needs and is designed as a container service implementable in both private and public clouds. The following procedures bring together the various installation and configuration steps to install Guardium Insights. The process is divided into five main tasks:

• System requirements
• Red Hat setup
• OpenShift installation
• IBM Cloud Private installation
• Guardium Insights installation

The Guardium Installation Manager (GIM) allows you to install, upgrade, and manage agents on individual servers or groups of servers.  In this course, you will learn about GIM Agent installation planning, installation steps and validation, and installation troubleshooting.  This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

The Guardium Installation Manager (GIM) allows you to install, upgrade, and manage agents on individual servers or groups of servers.  In this course, you will learn about GIM deployment and usage, and includes GIM reports, registration and authentication, and troubleshooting.  This is Part 2 of a two-part series.

In this video, Leila Johannesen demonstrates a Guardium integration with Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop (CDH).

Guardium technical support commonly analyzes the Buffer Usage Monitor Report & Sniffer must_gather to determine problems occurring with in the Guardium environment. This Open Mic explores those reports and information commonly analyzed.

Organizations have many goals for monitoring data servers. These goals require many rules, some of which  apply to a broad set of data servers, and some of which might apply to only one or a few data servers.

In this video, you learn how to organize these rules into a series of policies to optimize maintainability.

Polices are a core component of the Guardium Solution. Policies are sets of rules and actions applied in real time to the database traffic observed by a Guardium system. Policies define which traffic is ignored or logged, which activities require more granular logging, and which activities should trigger an alert or block access to the database.  Therefore, it is critical to develop strategies and techniques associated with polices to maintain a healthy Guardium ecosystem while meeting business requirements. This course consolidates every Guardium policy course on the Security Learning Academy, which provides you with practical knowledge and hands-on experiences to help you develop effective and efficient Guardium polices in your environment. 

In this course, you learn about creating, installing, and tuning Guardium polices through various related videos and labs. In addition, you learn about policy strategy, recommended practices when designing your polices, and advanced policy techniques.

Franklin Almonte

Lou Fuka

Avi Waleruis

Guardium policies often have multiple rules. By default, after a rule is triggered, processing stops. If you do not want to stop processing after the first rule triggers, you must configure your policy to continue to the next rule. In this lab, you configure and test a policy to examine the continuation functionality.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Louis Fuka

Starting with version 10.6, Guardium has a new query and report builder. This builder incorporates many of the 10.x design features, including a format that presents configuration options as sections, as well as an intuitive, step-by-step guide to create and configure the query. The report is automatically generated from the query. If the query is modified, the report is automatically regenerated when the query is saved.

In the lab exercises, you create a query and report that shows SQL commands. Then you generate data to test the report and view the results.

Guardium policies are powerful resources to monitor your data environment. However, due to the large amount of data activity in a database production environment, you must configure your policy carefully to filter out innocent traffic.

Starting with version 10.6, IBM Guardium features special policies that work at the session level. These policies are installed and processed before standard data-security policies, and respond to information that is available at the beginning of a database session. This feature allows quicker processing and response. In this lab, you create and test a session-level policy. 

Franklin Almonte

During this Tech Talk, Guardium experts discuss hints and tips for a successful upgrade to v10

During this Open Mic session, Carolina Leme from Guardium Level 2 support discusses user management and roles and responsibilities.  The bookmarks in the video will take you to the following topics:

• Administrator responsibilities
• Root user
  
• GUI users
• CLI access
• Roles and permissions
  

Load balancing automatically allocates managed units to S-TAP agents when new S-TAPs are installed and during fail-over when a managed unit is unavailable. The load balancing application also dynamically re-balances loaded or busy managed units by relocating S-TAP agents to less-loaded managed units.  These topics are discussed in this Open Mic.

MongoDB is a free and open-source cross-platform document-oriented database program.  In this video, you will see a detailed demonstration of Guardium Vulnerability Assessment for MongoDB, including the process to set up and run the test, and what happens after you harden the database per recommendations from the assessment.

In this video, you will learn about some major performance improvements and stability improvements in the Guardium Windows S-TAP V10 series.

In this video, you will see how to use specific Guardium GUI reports to check the data being logged on a Guardium Appliance .

Updating your Guardium environment is an important part of maintaining your site, and can provide new features and enhancements as well as fixing bugs. In this video series, you learn how to download a Guardium patch from IBM Fix Central and upload patch files to your Guardium environment.

IBM Guardium version 10.6 introduces multi-threading capabilities to vulnerability assessment. With multi-threading, you can run vulnerability assessments in parallel, reducing completion time while more efficiently using CPU resources. 

In this video series, you will see how to configure vulnerability assessment multi-threading.

This intermediate level guide discusses the default  user roles in Guardium. Students learn the purpose of each role, the applications that the role has access to, and what the default user desktop that is associated with the role looks like.

IBM Guardium uses data activity monitoring, file activity monitoring, and vulnerability assessment to help ensure the security, privacy, and integrity of your data. Guardium can be deployed on various cloud environments, including Amazon AWS EC2, Google, IBM SoftLayer, and Microsoft Azure. The following guides provide instructions you can use to deploy a Guardium instance in a specific cloud.

In this Open Mic, you will learn about IBM Guardium distributed reports. This Central Manager feature provides a way to automatically gather data from all or a subset of the Guardium managed units that are associated with this particular Central Manager. Distributed reports are designed to provide a high-level view, to correlate data from across data sources, and to summarize views of the data.

With Guardium, you can set up rules that automatically terminate database sessions when Guardium detects improper data access, limiting the damage from hostile attacks on your database.

In this videos, you learn how to configure the S-TAP agent and create policy rules to take advantage of S-GATE functionality.

This course covers:

• How to capture must gathers from Guardium
• Collecting a guard_diag for a Guardium S-TAP installed on UNIX
• How to Upload Data to a Support Ticket (PMR)
• Using Guardium cli commands iptraf and tcpdump to troubleshoot network issues

The video provides details on IBM Guardium release 10.1.3. This release helps to speed compliance and simplify deployments.

This Open Mic discusses how to troubleshoot underlying problems causing you to receive Sniffer restart and High CPU correlation alerts.

Are you getting ready to administer database security policies? Learn how to configure Guardium to discover, classify, analyze, protect, and control access to sensitive data. You learn to perform a vulnerability assessment, and how to monitor data and file activity. This course teaches you how to create reports, audits, alerts, metrics, and compliance oversight processes. 

Objectives 

• Identify the primary functions of IBM Security Guardium
• Apply key Guardium architecture components
• Navigate the Guardium user interface and command line interface
• Manage user access to Guardium
• Build and populate Guardium groups
• Use the administration console to manage Guardium components
• Configure policy rules that process the information gathered from database and file servers
• Use the configuration auditing system, Vulnerability Assessment application, and Database Discovery to perform data security tasks
• Create queries and reports to examine trends and gather data
• Automate compliance workflow processes
• Use file activity monitoring to keep track of the files on your servers

S-TAP and K-TAP are Guardium components that can intercept database communications between clients and the database server. This course includes the following materials:

• Guardium: Linux S-TAP installation guidance
• Troubleshooting the Guardium S-TAP Verification Process
• How can a SLON capture be created on an InfoSphere Guardium Appliance

In this Guardium Open Mic, the following topics are discussed:  Shared Secrets, ID's and Passwords, Ports and Firewalls, Backups and Archives, Supportability Options

IBM Guardium 10.1.4 introduces the capability for all managed units, agents, and clients to communicate by using Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol version 1.2. This capability enhances security in your data center.

In this series of three videos, you learn how to enable TLS1.2 in your IBM Guardium environment.

Duration: 15 minutes

This IBM Guardium Open Mic discusses the following topics:

• How to tell if KTAP will install directly on a kernel version? (i.e how to use ktaposmatch)
• Options to build KTAP for unlisted kernel versions (flex_loading, and custom ktap build), including examples of each case, with GIM and non-GIM installs.

This course introduces  you to the Guardium interface and command line interface. You learn how to access common Guardium features and applications. You can use the Guardium command line interface (CLI) to automate and script functions that are frequently used. You learn how to search the CLI for commands and list applicable options.

In the lab, you explore the Guardium GUI and learn how to classify data in your database environment. You create a new classification policy that searches for credit card numbers and populates the Sensitive Objects group with the table name and column name for each detected incident. 

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Franklin Almonte

IBM Guardium provides tools for helping meet the requirements of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard.

In this video series, you become familiar with Guardium features that pertain to the PCI data security standard. You see a demonstration of how the features are configured.

Guardium processes large amounts of information about database access. In this video, you will learn to take steps to prevent your Guardium internal database filling up, troubleshoot when it is filling up and take action to reduce the space when needed.

In Guardium, when a database user name in a report is blank, the cause should be investigated by the Guardium administrator.  In this course, you will learn various causes and solutions for missing DB USER information, illustrated with specific examples. 



In this video, you will learn some tips and tricks for keeping your Windows S-TAP up and running with fewer issues.  You will investigate the following parameters and settings:

• USE_TLS=1
• DB2_EXIT_DRIVER_INSTALLED
• WFP_DRIVER_INSTALLED
• SOFTWARE_TAP_HOST or TAP_IP
• LOAD_BALANCER_IP
• GUARD_TAP.INI
• LHMON_DRIVER_INSTALLED
• TAP_MIN_TIME_BEFOREFAILOVER
• TAP_MIN_HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL

In this course, targeted for Guardium administrators, you'll learn about Severity 1 problems when the Database or Database Server might be effected, and be provided key troubleshooting recommendations and information to gather if necessary.

In Guardium, you may have a situation where the database user name in a report is blank, or there is a question mark, or may be a string of random characters. In this course, you will learn how to import the new missing DB user dashboard and use it to troubleshoot and take actions to resolve the problem.

The correct approach for upgrading Guardium depends on multiple factors, which include the version you are upgrading from, the hardware of your system, and any special partitioning requirements you might have. A common way to upgrade Guardium to the latest version is the upgrade patch method. Use an upgrade patch to upgrade all systems in a managed environment. The upgrade patch preserves all data and configurations with the exception of UI customizations due to a new UI architecture.

In this course, you learn how to plan a Guardium 11 upgrade, how to install the upgrade patch, and how to troubleshoot common installation failures.

Franklin Almonte

In this course, you learn how to monitor your Guardium environment with system alerts. You will see how to set up the Inactive S-TAPs Since alert.

IBM Guardium provides powerful functions you can use to monitor and control database access. Guardium can terminate sessions performing suspicious database access commands and even quarantine suspicious users. In this lab, you explore the session termination and quarantine functionality.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

IBM Guardium 10.1.4 has new functionality to protect Oracle 11 databases that reside on Amazon AWS. In this video series, you will learn how to discover cloud databases. Then you will see how to classify and audit sensitive objects.

Regular upkeep of your data security environment is required to keep the system aligned with the ever-changing IT environment, including new data servers, new uses of sensitive data, new users, and new applications. Organizations that use IBM Guardium for data security and compliance can take advantage of a rich set of APIs to automate processes and maintain the system in a more efficient manner. 

In this course, you learn how Guardium APIs can speed deployment and automate repetitive tasks such as creating a datasource, updating users, and modifying groups.

The lab environment reflects Guardium 10.5.

Franklin Almonte

Peak database traffic periods can overload monitoring solutions. The Guardium flat log policy provides a way to defer analysis and logging of traffic to off-peak periods. In this video series, you learn about the flat log policy and how it can help you avoid resource overload.

In this Tech Talk, Guardium experts provide an overview of what is new in Guardium 10.1.4, including enhancements in compliance, ease of use, agents, and platform.

In this Tech Talk, Shay Harel discusses several new IBM Guardium 10.6 enhancements that improve usability, core functionality and enable greater extensibility to new types of data environments. In the area of usability, there is a new policy builder user interface, as well as easier to use query report builder. There are new monitoring capabilities for Database as a Service. In addition, Guardium performance has been enhanced. Vulnerability assessment has improved accuracy and scan granularity. File access management with NAS and SharePoint enables consistent data protection across unstructured as well as structured data.

In this video, Shay Harel, Director of Data Security Engineering, explores the new features and updates in IBM Guardium v11. 

Topics include:

• Upgrade
• Active threat analytics
• Risk spotter
• Policy analyzer
• Smart Assistant
• CyberArk integration
• Data protection for files (Sharepoint and NAS)       
• Vulnerability Assessment enhancements
• External STAP with Kubernetes
• Monitor DBaaS without STAP
• New platform support database
• Miscellaneous updates

In this video, Shay Harel, Director of Data Security Engineering, explores the new features and updates in IBM Guardium v11.1. 

In this video, you learn about the Windows S-TAP debug log changes that were implemented in Guardium versions 10 to 11.

This Open Mic covered different aspects of IBM Guardium certificates, including the prerequisite for installing certificates, how to create request certificates, converting certificates in the format that Guardium supports, and the hierarchy of certificates.

IBM Security Guardium Patch Updates (GPUs) update the subversion of Guardium. It is common practice to install the latest GPU for both code fixes and feature/function enhancements.

In this lab, you upgrade a Central Manager appliance from subversion 11.0 to version 11.1 by first installing the Health Check Patch p9999 and then installing GPU p100.

The correct approach for upgrading IBM Security Guardium depends on multiple factors, which include the version you are upgrading from, the hardware of your system, and any special partitioning requirements you might have. A common way to upgrade Guardium to the latest version is the upgrade patch method. Use an upgrade patch to upgrade all systems in a managed environment. The upgrade patch preserves all data and configurations with the exception of user interface (UI) customizations due to a new UI architecture.

Overview