I'm cannibalising the script made available here to try and parse the security event log for certain file audit events. What I am trying to do is restrict the output to events that match a specific file name and access mask.
The event parser uses System.Text.StringBuilder
to construct the results object ($evt
), and I want to filter this to get the events I actually want.
Here's some of the raw output:
23/09/2015 10:50:23 AM userid F:\dir1 0x1
23/09/2015 10:50:23 AM userid F:\dir1\dir2 0x1
23/09/2015 10:50:23 AM userid F:\dir1\dir2\doc.docx 0x20000
The last line in the sample is the kind I'm trying to trap.
I'm creating each line as key/data pairs per the following
$out.AppendLine("TimeCreated = $($evt.TimeCreated),Username = $SubjectUserName,File = $ObjectName,AccessMask = $AccessMask")
Then I found that ConvertFrom-StringData
isn't happy with the backslashes in the file paths, so fixed that to create the hashtable:
$output = $out.ToString() -replace '\\', '\\'
$hash = convertfrom-stringdata -stringdata $output
But now I'm getting the following error:
convertfrom-stringdata : Data item 'TimeCreated' in line 'TimeCreated =
09/23/2015 10:50:23,Username = userid,File = F:\\dir1,AccessMask = 0x1'
is already defined.
I suspect I need to go back to first principles to filter event data with a known eventID and specific contents rather than mucking around with strings and hashtables (maybe a custom PSObject?), but can anyone illuminate what this error is about? Or a better way?
Filter the results before creating the output string:
$filename = 'F:\dir1\dir2\doc.docx'
$mask = '0x20000'
...
if ($ObjectName -eq $filename -and $AccessMask -eq $mask) {
$out.AppendLine("$($svr),$($evt.id),$($evt.TimeCreated),$SubjectUserName,$ObjectName,$AccessMask")
}
On a more general note, I'd say a more PoSh approach would be to create the data as custom objects and leave the CSV creation to Export-Csv
:
foreach ($svr in $server) {
Get-WinEvent -Computer $svr -FilterHashtable @{logname="security";id="4663"} -Oldest | ForEach-Object {
$xml = [xml]$_.ToXml()
$props = [ordered]@{
'ServerName' = $svr
'EventID' = $_.Id
'TimeCreated' = $_.TimeCreated
'UserName' = Select-Xml -Xml $xml -Namespace $ns -XPath "//e:Data[@Name='SubjectUserName']/text()" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value
'File_or_Folder' = Select-Xml -Xml $xml -Namespace $ns -XPath "//e:Data[@Name='ObjectName']/text()" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value
'AccessMask' = Select-Xml -Xml $xml -Namespace $ns -XPath "//e:Data[@Name='AccessMask']/text()" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value
}
New-Object -Type PSCustomObject -Property $props
} | Where-Object {
$_.'File_or_Folder' -eq $filename -and
$_.AccessMask -eq $mask
} | Export-Csv 'C:\Temp\4663Events.csv' -NoType -Append
}
I haven't compared the two approaches performance-wise, though.