The Role of the DBA Related to Insider Threats and Regulatory Compliance

We all remember too well the cases of Enron and WorldCom. In light of those cases, the government has created new laws commonly known as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 to protect investors and insure the accuracy of corporate disclosures. SOX-type regulations are being implemented around the world, including in Information Technology organizations.

These regulations revolve around setting up internal controls on many aspects of record keeping and being able to verify those controls as well. Traditionally, the database administrator (DBA) has access to all the corporate data, so that he or she can perform their assigned tasks, such as data import and export, creating reports, and maintaining database performance and stability.

Such a wide and deep level of exposure to the data is typically given to DBAs; however, DBAs have limited tools to provide the levels of controls and types of reporting for addressing both internal and external threats that are being expected of them under these new regulations.

This article will deal more specifically with insider threats to IT, which today are seen as much greater than outside threats. We will describe our research and findings and describe how the IT professionals we interviewed are implementing the necessary products, policies, and procedures to reduce insider threats and provide the necessary reporting for regulatory compliance.