Exchange Mailbox Access Auditing to Keep Track of Non-Owner Access

Full access rights are the highest level of access to a mailbox or a shared folder, so they should be delegated only to Exchange administrators or trusted employees. Many organizations have policies that permit admins to access other users’ mailboxes for support reasons and in-house HR or legal investigations, and to delete a mailbox when the user leaves the organization; otherwise, they should not be using those elevated permissions. With access auditing enabled, you can log mailbox access by users who are not mailbox owners to ensure there’s no abuse of privileges in your Microsoft Exchange Server environment, thereby hardening the security and privacy of your email information.

Enabling Exchange mailbox auditing with built-in tools

In addition to mailbox auditing, you need efficient permissions management, so you can ensure that only valid users or admins have the ability to access other users’ mailboxes and view email messages in them. When it comes to auditing Exchange mailbox access, you can use the built-in tools, but you’ll need to write PowerShell scripts to run commands enabling mailbox audit in the Exchange Management Shell. Be prepared to spend some time on this task, because you’ll also have to write scripts to set mailbox audit logging on multiple mailboxes, retrieve audit log entries, and export audit log entries into Excel format — and then you’ll have to spend even more of your valuable time to turn that raw data into useful reports. Are you ready to dust off your PowerShell skills and spend your lunch breaks in the office? On top of that, keeping audit logs requires large amounts of disk space, and native tools simply can’t help you out with this. So is there a way to enable efficient mailbox auditing that you can rely to keep your mailbox data secure?

Streamlining Exchange mailbox access auditing with Netwrix Auditor

Are you ready to log mailbox access events and get useful reports with far less effort and stress? Netwrix Auditor for Exchange is about to change your Exchange audit logging experience. With Netwrix Auditor at your fingertips, you can:

• Stress no more that an unauthorized mailbox access will go unnoticed. Out-of-the-box, ready-to-use reports deliver deep insight about mailbox access by non-owners, as well as actions inside a specific mailbox, including which items were viewed, modified or deleted.
• Simplify reporting by subscribing to the reports that you find most critical and get them automatically on the schedule you specify.
• Chase down any aberrant non-owner mailbox access or other suspicious actions using the Google-like Interactive Search.
• Block privilege abuse in its early stages with custom alerts that you can set up on any critical activity — for example, non-owner access to the CEO’s mailbox.
• Expand mailbox audit logging beyond mailbox access by tracking changes to permissions and Exchange Server configuration, as well as mailbox deletions.
• Stop worrying about storage, because now you can keep your audit data stored securely for over 10 years in a cost-effective two-tiered (SQL database + file-based) storage and have easy access to it any time you need.