CareGroup checks out Symantec database security tool

摘要

CareGroup Healthcare System, with six hospitals in the Boston area, for years has let patients from home or elsewhere gain access to their medical records over the Web with the password and ID that their doctors gave them. However, CareGroup didn't have a way to monitor traffic going to the patient records stored in IBM and Oracle databases at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's data center, which supports applications for all the CareGroup hospitals. "If someone deleted information, we weren't able to prove it," says Ayad Shammoot, senior database administrator analyst. "We didn't even know how much traffic we had." When Shammoot learned about six months ago that Symantec was developing a database-monitoring tool, he decided CareGroup would become an alpha user, letting Symantec install it to monitor three selected databases. The appliance monitors network traffic using the same underlying "sniffing" engine as Symantec's Network Security 7100 Series intrusion-prevention appliance. But Symantec also has developed software that analyzes database queries. The current version of the Symantec appliance does not block suspicious queries — it monitors and reports on what the database is up to.