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

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

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. 

Author: Franklin Almonte

Use this database to identify supported platforms for data activity monitoring on Guardium V11.0 and later.  

This lab demonstrates bidirectional integration of IBM® QRadar® SIEM and IBM® Guardium®.  QRadar SIEM collects the logs from various devices in enterprise networks.  The logs are received through connectors called Device Support Module (DSM).  QRadar has a DSM for Guardium. That DSM enables QRadar to receive and process logs from Guardium.

Alternatively, Guardium has an API that provides an option for QRadar to react to certain events detected by QRadar, and send Guardium those commands to adjust the database policy to properly react to the event.  For example, if QRadar detects that the source IP from an internal network is communicating with an IP address classified as the Botnet Server, it can send a command to Guardium to block any access to the database from the same IP address.  The call from QRadar to Guardium can be done using the Custom Actions feature of QRadar or using IBM Security Directory Integrator® (IDI) that acts as the proxy; transforming various events from QRadar into Guardium API calls.

This IDI solution uses custom developed code that IBM provides as-is without any support and maintenance commitments. You can download the code from the Security Learning Academy in the Additional Resources section of this course.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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

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.

This video demonstrates how to configure a Guardium correlation alert and view the alert after it triggers.

This video demonstrates how to create, configure, and view a Guardium real-time alert when it triggers.

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.

Configuring and validating the Alert and Anomaly Detection engines is one of the first steps when you are configuring Guardium alerts. In this video, you learn how to configure and validate the Alert and Anomaly Detection engines.

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
  

This video course demonstrates how to create a Guardium custom alerts dashboard that centralizes alerting activities.

Franklin Almonte

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Overview

In this video, you will see how to check the Aggregation/Archive log for errors.  This could be particularly helpful in preventing database full issues.

In this video, you will see how to check Guardium database usage and how much data is in the top tables.  This is critical information to prevent database full issues.

In this video, you see how to check the Guardium policy for actions that can fill the database.  This is an important step in preventing database full issues.

In this video, you will see how to use Guardium reports to show how data is spread across tables and across time.  This is important information to help prevent database full issues.

In this video, you will see how to check and turn auto_stop_services on in Guardium.  This is important to help prevent database full issues.

In this video, you will see how to set Guardium notifications to alert you when your database reaches a specified threshold.  This is particularly useful in preventing database full issues.

In this video, you see how to check that the latest Guardium GPU patch is installed.  This is an important task and can be particularly helpful in preventing database full issues.

In this video, you learn how to check the Guardium purge period.  This is important information in helping to prevent database full issues.

In this video, you will see how to check available disk space in Guardium. This is important information to have to prevent database full issues.

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 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

Global enterprises are discovering the rigorous task of becoming GDPR compliant. IBM Security Guardium Analyzer can help with your GDPR impact assessment plan by answering the question of "Where is my GDPR- relevant data?" It enables you to efficiently identify risk associated with personal and sensitive personal data that falls under the GDPR. 

• Analyze on-prem and cloud-based databases to find GDPR relevant data 
• Use next generation data classification and vulnerability scanning
• Surface data exposures through dynamic dashboards; providing information, such as, the number of databases affected, severity breakdown, and geographic breakdown
• Take steps to minimize risk based on the information provided

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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 video, you learn how to configure the Guardium archive.

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
  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

This learning module demonstrates the integration of IBM Guardium and IBM IGI products to support the GDPR compliance initiative on structure data. The solution provides a custom developed AssemblyLine that runs in IBM Directory Integrator (IDI), and an IBM Identity Governance and Intelligence (IGI) Custom Adapter that requires IBM Directory Server and IDI to run.

The integration goal is to identify GDPR sensitive data using a provided sample database using IBM Guardium. Guardium then exports a report that contains users who have access to tables with GDPR relevant data. Then, the IGI Custom Adapter imports these reports into IGI for further compliance and access management.

The course provides a lab environment where the integration can be tested and demonstrated.

Also, if you do not have time to run the lab, you can review the videos that demonstrate all steps in the lab.

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

IBM Guardium released an upgrade patch that allows you to upgrade your Central Manager, aggregators, and collectors from version 9.X to version 10.1.3. In this video series, you learn how to prepare your environment and apply the upgrade patch to your Central Manager and managed units.

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

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 demonstration, you learn how to configure and run a database vulnerability assessment.

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.

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

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

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.

This self-paced learning content represents an integration scenario that uses IBM Privileged Identify Manager (PIM), IBM Guardium, IBM Network Protection (XGS), IBM QRadar, and IBM Directory Integrator (IDI). The course includes three videos that depict a database administrator interacting with the system. Watch the videos in the following order:

1)     Testing Initial PIM and Guardium Setup – This video shows the basic functionality of PIM and Guardium without implementing integration between them.

2)     Testing PIM and Guardium Integration – This video shows the benefits of integrating PIM and Guardium. There is no direct integration path between the two products. QRadar and IDI are used to bridge integration gaps between PIM and Guardium.

3)     Testing a Complete Integration Solution– This video shows a fully integrated security solution. It includes the XGS appliance that terminates any existing connection from the database administrator workstation to the database server.

This course also includes an Integration Guide that documents the configuration steps necessary to integrate the products. It also includes the IDI.zip file that contains the custom files, including developed IDI assembly lines, necessary to successfully implement this integration scenario.

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.

This is a commercial course that is available through our training partners. Please follow the link below to enroll in this course. 

Overview 

 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 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. 

Audience 

 Database administrators, security administrators, security analysts, security technical architects, and professional services using IBM Guardium. 

Prerequisites 

Before taking this course, make sure that you have the following skills: 

• Working knowledge of SQL queries for IBM DB2 and other databases
• Working knowledge of UNIX commands 
• Familiarity with data protection standards such as HIPAA and CPI

Click on this link to go to the IBM Training Website to find a training partner for this course.