Permissions, Ownership, and Auditing

Abstract

Windows offers lots of very powerful features to prevent unauthorized access to your corporate data. The majority of these are available only when you use the New Technology File System (NTFS) that we reviewed in Chapter 2. In this chapter, we will delve further into the specifics of NTFS and focus on the features that allow you to secure your files by applying various permissions to accept or restrict access. We will provide you guidance on how to re-take ownership to gain control of orphaned files and, finally, review options for low-level fine-grained auditing of files and folders that are useful when investigating whether users are accessing (or attempting to access!) restricted files.