At the time, the US companies spend a total of $120 billion on printed forms annually, and each employee uses about 10,000 sheets of paper according to CompTIA. That’s why printer usage monitoring is very important to cut costs for printer supplies and their utilization. Another reason to know who and how uses corporate printers is to manage your resources and plan upgrades or downgrades… Read More »
When performing forensic analysis or system audit activities, you may want to track what programs ran on the investigated computers. Windows security auditing lets you enable process tracking and monitor process creation and process termination. To enable process auditing you should use Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) or Local Security Policy (secpol.msc). You should configure Security Settings -> Audit Policy -> Audit Process Tracking or use… Read More »
Let’s assume you have a shared folder on a server which is accessible by all employees in your company. The users commonly copy some documents into this folder to let the others to work with these shared documents. One day you discover that some files unexpectedly disappeared from the shared folder. Usually this means that someone deleted these files (consciously or unconsciously). Now we need to… Read More »
Have you ever seen that your computer starts booting slowly? Or it slowly restores its state from hibernation. Maybe you observe performance issues when shutdown or hibernate process? In this article, I will show you how you can use Event Log Explorer to find performance problems linked with the startup/shutdown/hibernate/resume processes. Starting from Windows Vista, Microsoft provides a bunch of event logs for different system… Read More »
In my article “Exploring who logged on the system“, I described how to add to the event list custom columns that display data from the event description. Probably you might think that adding custom columns works for Security event logs only. Although we initially designed Custom columns feature exactly for Security logs (and referred them by name, e.g. Subject\Account name), we made it possible to use… Read More »
A key instrument for event logs analysis is the function of event filtering. All known event log analysis tools have filtering feature, and I suppose, it is the most demanded feature of these applications. Setting filter for the most of event fields is easy. As a rule, all the event log applications let you filter by timeframe, event level, source, event IDs, users or computers… Read More »
You have probably heard that due to a date bug, it is easy to brick iPhone by changing its system date to Jan 1, 1970. If you are not aware of this issue, you may read it here. We found a very similar problem with event logging. Fortunately, nothing crashes, but the problem may stop a log from being loaded. Recently we received a bug… Read More »
In my previous post, I explained how to display logon type for logon events in Security log and described meaning of some values. Here I will give you more information about logon types. The descriptions of some events (4624, 4625) in Security log commonly contain some information about “logon type”, but it is too brief: The logon type field indicates the kind of logon that occurred.… Read More »