Reasons why Database Firewall is so Needed
If you have confidential or sensitive data, you should know that it is a big responsibility to protect it from exposure or theft. Think about compliance or just protect your biggest business asset – the data.
If you still live under a rock and think that you don’t need a database firewall, think again. Most likely there is someone interested in your sensitive information misuse.
Three reasons why your databases can be hacked
1. Your competitors want to get a piece of your business
2. Bad guys are planning to steal your data to sell it on the black market or blackmail you.
3. There are some hackers that breach the databases just for fun.
DataSunrise could make you feel confident about your data security. It provides efficient pro-active protection by continuously monitoring the database traffic, preventing SQL injections, data breaches, and privileged user abuse. In other words, DataSunrise database firewall protects your data from all types of external and insider data breach threats.
How Database firewall defends your databases?
Database firewalls mostly rely on “signature analysis” method. These “signatures” resemble any SQL statement sequences known as typically used by hackers. The firewall intercepts incoming SQL query and compares its code with known signatures.
Signature lists are being continually updated to enable firewalls to defend against the latest threats hitting databases. Some database firewalls are able to collect information on client application type, IP address, location, time, etc. and consider it while performing signature analysis.
Of course, signature-based systems can identify only already-known threats — the ones they know about. That’s why firewall developers employ another, but quite similar, technology as well.
The White List
The White List contains SQL statement sequences routinely used in given database environment (thus considered as safe). Database firewall compares all the incoming queries with the White List statements to define if it should ignore them.
The Black List
This list contains the description of potential threats. If any SQL statement detected by a firewall is present in the Black List, that query will be blocked right away.
Security Steps Followed by DataSunrise Database Security Suite
Database Activity Monitoring – Data Audit
At the data auditing stage data quality is ensured right from the beginning of the BI (Business Intelligence) process and to the final objective accomplishment. At this stage, data validation and data staging are performed. Data audit ensures that data quality remains at the required level throughout the business process.
DataSunrise helps you to administer data evaluation process due to its Data Audit component. Information collected by the Data Audit is validated and reliable enough to be used for SQL analysis purposes and prevent data breach or unauthorized database access.
Data Security
Prevention of unauthorized queries and SQL injections in the first place is even more important. DataSunrise intercepts all the SQL queries and analyzes them to decide which are the authorized ones and which are malicious ones. Suspicious queries are blocked by the firewall.
Data Masking
The feature is helpful when a company needs to provide access to its databases for third-party employees for testing or software developing purposes. Data masking tools change the original content with random values or certain characters, leaving it available for testing purposes.
Sensitive Data Discovery
High-risk data such as credit card numbers, account passwords, personally identifiable data require special attention. Sensitive Data Discovery feature enables you to quickly detect and manage confidential data across different platforms. Search patterns are editable so you can perform a search for any specific pattern.
What Can Database Firewall Security Do for You?
1. Identify dormant user accounts, prevent account theft and privilege creep.
2. Hide your sensitive data from unauthorized users using data masking technology.
3. Provide different access levels to different users. For instance “Read only” to one and “Edit/Insert/Delete” to another. This way the database owner can control user access to certain database elements.
4. The firewall can be updated on a centralized basis and individual users don’t have to update it on their machines.
DataSunrise Database Security software is easy to install and manage. A complete step-by-step user guide is available for the product users.
DataSunrise supports all major databases and data warehouses such as Oracle, IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, MySQL, MariaDB, Greenplum, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Azure, Teradata and more. You are welcome to download a free trial if would like to install on your premises. In case you are a cloud user and run your database on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure you can get it from AWS market place or Azure market place.
