Bankart’s Objectives
In 2011, as part of its commitment to providing quality and secure services to its member banks and to comply with PCI and other industry requirements, Bankart set an objective to improve monitoring of access to sensitive data (card holder information, key data etc.), user logons/logoffs and BASE24 activity.
In addition to meeting key regulatory requirements, Bankart also sought to achieve benefits in:
- Heightened security with real-time alerts for security issues.
- Improved system productivity from prompt interventions based on alerts.
- Enhanced staff efficiency by reducing time required to find anomalous events.
To this end, Bankart conducted an assessment and review of NonStop system tools and a number of third party products to determine the best approach to meeting these compliance and internal security requirements.
About Bankart
Bankart, d.o.o. was founded in 1997 to process payment instruments on behalf of a group of Slovenian Banks. Today, Bankart provides credit card and ATM processing services, as well as POS terminal processing to all banks and other financial institutions in Slovenia. The company also provides the data required for effecting payments, including transaction authorizations, ATM maintenance, and card personalisation. In addition, Bankart operates SEPA clearing centre for Slovenian and Eastern European banks, which provides member banks with standardized SEPA payment procedures.
The CSP Solution
Upon completion of this assessment, Bankart chose CSP’s offerings as an effective means to achieve their objectives. CSP products enabled Bankart to meet their needs by providing:
- Real-time monitoring of access to sensitive system files, logons and logoffs
- Daily change reports for system files
- Security Management tools
‘We were impressed by CSP’s responsiveness in extending their product support to base24 OMF logs. They are truly committed to fulfilling their customers needs.’
Gregor Pirc, IT Manager, Bankart, d.o.o
Implementation
Bankart employs the following CSP products:
Protect XP Suite, consisting of:
- Protect – Safeguard management
- Auditview – audit reports
- Alert-Plus – real time alerts on audit and event logs
CRM/FIC, consisting of:
- CRM – compliance reporting module
- FIC – File integrity checking
CSP PassPort & NetPass
CSP products are easy to install and configure and their standardized GUI interface makes for effective operation. This is further supplemented by 24×7 Technical Support.
Real-time event monitoring
A key goal of the project was to provide visibility on events as they happened. Although Bankart could access the Safeguard audit trails using the built-in HP provided tool, this provided information only after the fact (even if run every few hours) and was available only after extensive filtering and analysis.
CSP Alert-Plus provided a simple mechanism to capture and act on selected events
instantaneously. Using the built-in rules, Bankart quickly set up monitoring on a range of activities.
Selected events are now found by Alert-Plus, and sent using the built in syslog forwarder to LogRhythm, Bankart’s central event management monitoring system, for immediate review.
BASE24
In addition to the Safeguard audit trails, Bankart also needed to monitor the BASE24 OMF logs. Again, reading these logs after the event was not enough – Bankart administrators needed to see certain events in real-time.
CSP worked with Bankart to implement Alert-Plus support for BASE24 OMF logs, and created a range of rules which forward key events to LogRhythm as they happen.
‘CSP products have given us a new level of visibility on key system and application events, improving our control, security and productivity’,
Gregor Pirc, IT Manager, Bankart, d.o.o
File Change monitoring
File integrity is a key aspect of PCI compliance. This requires that planned changes are appropriately checked off, and that unplanned changes are flagged and itemized.
To be compliant, Bankart determined that they needed to track and monitor changes to specific files. These checks would need to be made daily, and triggered on specified attributes, including content, security settings, progid and other Safeguard settings.
CSP FIC (File Integrity Checker) delivered a clean and effective solution. Filesets can be easily specified (up to 1400 files in Bankart’s case based on wildcard patterns), required attributes established, and reports scheduled within the FIC GUI.
CSP FIC provides output for quick review, and a database for detailed and historical analysis.
Bankart correlates detected changes with the development group and these are managed using the Bankart Change Management system.
Approved changes can be added to the baseline using a special administrator key.
Conclusion
Bankart has been able to meet its key compliance objectives with the assistance of CSP’s technologies.
With the successful implementation of real alerts on Safeguard and BASE24 logs, and file change monitoring, Bankart has measurably improved the security, productivity and efficiency of its NonStop systems and operations.