What should be considered best practice when selecting Integrity Monitoring rules?

Choosing to decide what is critical and create custom rules represents a strategic and focused approach to Integrity Monitoring. This best practice centers on the principle of risk management, where organizations identify their most important assets and prioritize monitoring efforts accordingly. By customizing rules based on criticality, organizations can effectively allocate their resources to monitor the areas that provide the most significant security needed, reducing noise from less important data and ensuring efficient alerting mechanisms.

Monitoring all system elements, while comprehensive, can lead to an overwhelming volume of alerts that may cause important notifications to be missed or ignored, thus undermining security efforts. Simply monitoring files and folders does not capture the entire scope of what might be necessary for maintaining security; there could be other critical system components and configurations to consider. Similarly, relying solely on the default settings might not tailor the monitoring to the unique environment or threats an organization faces, which can leave significant gaps in security. Customizing rules ensures that monitoring aligns with an organization’s specific security policies and risk profile, leading to a more effective protective strategy.