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IT Risk Assessment Overview

To help you identify configuration gaps in your environment and understand their impact on overall security, Netwrix Auditor offers a dashboard with a number of metrics and drill-down reports on IT risk assessment. They pinpoint the weak points in your IT infrastructure such as overly broad assignment of access rights, loose password policies, and stale accounts. This information will help you to take corrective measures in the required area, ensuring the IT risks stay in the safe zone.

Risk assessment dashboard can be accessed by clicking the Risk assessment tile in the main window of Netwrix Auditor. For details about using the dashboard, see IT Risk Assessment Dashboard.

For details about metrics calculation, see How Risk Levels Are Estimated .

Providing Data for Risk Assessment

To provide data for metrics and reports that belong to different categories, you will need to configure monitoring plans that will process related data sources. These monitoring plans should have at least one item added. See the following table for the certain reports:

CategoryReport nameCollect data from
Users and ComputersUser accounts with "Password never expires"AD domain
User accounts with "Password not required"AD domain
Disabled computer accountsAD domain
Inactive user accountsAD domain
Inactive computer accountsAD domain
Servers with Guest account enabledWindows Server
Servers that have local user accounts with "Password never expires"Windows Server
PermissionsUser accounts with administrative permissionsAD domain
Administrative groupsAD domain
Administrative group membership sprawlWindows Server
Empty security groupAD domain
Site collections with the "Get a link" feature enabledSharePoint farm
Sites with the "Anonymous access" feature enabledSharePoint farm
Site collections with broken inheritanceSharePoint farm
Sites with broken inheritanceSharePoint farm
DataFiles and folders accessible by EveryoneWindows File Server
Sensitive data shared with Everyone *Windows File Server
File and folder names containing sensitive dataWindows File Server
Potentially harmful files on file sharesWindows File Server
Direct permissions on files and foldersWindows File Server
Direct permissions to sensitive files *Windows File Server
Documents and list items accessible by Everyone and Authenticated UsersSharePoint farm
Files shared with external usersWindows File Server
Files shared with anonymous usersWindows File Server
Documents and list items accessible by EveryoneWindows File Server
Files that can be modified by external users or anonymous usersWindows File Server
InfrastructureServers with inappropriate operating systemsWindows Server
Servers with under-governed Windows Update configurationsWindows Server
Servers with unauthorized antivirus softwareWindows Server

NOTE: Risks marked with (*) require both pre-configured NDC SQL database connection and NDC API connection. To check configuration status, go to Settings > Sensitive Data Discovery. See Sensitive Data Discovery for more information.

NOTE: Right after setting up the integration the drill down reports might be empty, while the risk indicator is already completed. Please wait until Auditor gets all the information from Netwrix Data Classification it needs.

Required Monitoring Plan Settings

To provide data needed for risk assessment, the related monitoring plan must be set up to store data to the audit database.

Also, consider that all risk metrics and related reports require state-in-time data to be collected. You can select the relevant option when creating a new monitoring plan, as described in the Create a New Monitoring Plan section. For the exising plan, refer to the procedure below.

To verify the necessary settings of the existing plan

  1. Select the monitoring plan you need and click the Edit button.
  2. In the right pane of the dialog displayed, select Edit settings from the Monitoring plan section.
  3. Go to the Audit Database section and make sure that Disable security intelligence ... checkbox is cleared. This will instruct Netwrix Auditor to store data to both Long-Term Archive and audit database: edit_mp_store_data_to_db
  4. Save the settings and return to the window with the monitoring plan details. Make sure you have at least one monitored item in the plan. If necessary, add an item.
  5. Select the data source you need (for example, Active Directory) and click Edit data source from the Data source section on the right. edit_mp_open_ds_settings
  6. Make sure that:
    1. Monitor this data source and collect activity data is switched ON.
    2. Collect data for state-in-time reports is switched ON.
  7. Save the settings and close the dialog.

edit_data_source_sit