ShareWatcher: Track File Changes Across Your NetworkMonitoring file activity across a network is essential for security, compliance, and efficient operations. ShareWatcher — a tool designed to track file changes across network shares — helps administrators detect unauthorized access, trace configuration drift, and maintain an audit trail of modifications. This article explains ShareWatcher’s purpose, core features, deployment considerations, common use cases, best practices, and alternatives so you can decide whether it fits your environment.
What is ShareWatcher?
ShareWatcher is a network share monitoring solution that detects and logs file and folder changes on SMB/CIFS shares and similar network storage. It runs agents or leverages built-in file system event notifications to capture create, modify, delete, and rename events, then aggregates, filters, and notifies administrators about meaningful activity.
Why monitor file changes?
Monitoring file activity on shared storage matters for several reasons:
- Security: Unauthorized file modifications can indicate data exfiltration, ransomware encryption, or insider misuse.
- Compliance: Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX often require logs of access and changes to sensitive data.
- Operational visibility: Tracking who changed configuration files, scripts, or shared resources reduces time-to-diagnosis when services break.
- Forensics and auditing: Retaining a timeline of file events helps reconstruct incidents and supports evidence collection.
Core features of ShareWatcher
- Event detection: Watches for file create, modify, delete, and rename operations with timestamps and user identity.
- Real-time alerts: Sends notifications via email, webhooks, or integration with SIEMs when suspicious or predefined events occur.
- Centralized logging: Aggregates events from multiple servers and shares into a searchable index or database.
- Filtering and correlation: Suppresses noise (temporary files, antivirus scans) and correlates events across hosts to identify patterns.
- Role-based access: Limits who can view logs or change monitoring rules.
- Retention and archiving: Keeps historical events for a configurable retention period to meet compliance needs.
- Lightweight agents or agentless operation: Offers flexible deployment to suit environments with strict change control.
- Reporting and dashboards: Visual summaries of activity, trends, and anomaly detection.
How ShareWatcher detects changes
ShareWatcher generally uses one or both of the following methods:
- Native file system notifications: On Windows, the FileSystemWatcher API and USN Journal; on Linux, inotify or fanotify — these provide low-latency event streaming for most changes.
- Periodic scanning: For filesystems or NAS devices lacking reliable event APIs, ShareWatcher can perform scheduled directory snapshots and compute change sets (file hashes, timestamps) to detect differences.
Each method has trade-offs: real-time notifications are efficient but require OS support and proper permissioning; scanning is universal but increases load and may miss very transient changes.
Deployment models
- Agent-based: Small agents installed on file servers capture events locally and forward encrypted logs to a central server. Pros: accurate user identity, lower network overhead. Cons: requires installation and maintenance.
- Agentless: Uses remote APIs, SMB hooks, or network monitoring to infer changes. Pros: no agents to deploy. Cons: may miss detailed user attribution and can be less real-time.
- Hybrid: Agents for critical servers and agentless for externally hosted or appliance-based storage.
Consider network topology, firewall rules, and authentication mechanisms when planning deployment.
Integrations and ecosystem
ShareWatcher typically integrates with:
- SIEM platforms (Splunk, QRadar, Elastic) for long-term storage and correlation with other logs.
- Incident response tooling and ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow) to automate triage.
- Messaging/alerting (Slack, Teams, email) for operational visibility.
- Backup and version control systems to trigger snapshots or rollbacks after suspicious activity.
Common use cases
- Ransomware detection: Rapid spikes in file modifications or mass renames trigger alerts to halt spread and isolate systems.
- Insider threat detection: Unexpected access to sensitive folders by non-authorized accounts is flagged.
- Configuration drift tracking: Changes in shared configuration files across servers are recorded for rollback and root cause analysis.
- Audit support: Generating reports for auditors showing who accessed or changed regulated data.
- File integrity monitoring: Ensuring critical executables or scripts remain unchanged in production directories.
Best practices for effective monitoring
- Tune filters: Exclude benign patterns (antivirus temp files, system backups) to reduce alert fatigue.
- Define baselines: Understand normal activity volumes per share to detect abnormal spikes.
- Protect logs: Forward events to an immutable store or SIEM to prevent tampering by attackers.
- Retention policy: Balance storage costs and compliance needs when setting event retention.
- Least privilege: Run agents and ShareWatcher services with only the permissions they need to read change events.
- Test alerting workflows: Ensure alerts reach on-call staff and integrate with runbooks for common incidents.
- Periodic audits: Validate that ShareWatcher agents are up-to-date and that monitored shares match the asset inventory.
Privacy and legal considerations
Collecting file change events may include usernames, file paths, or file metadata. Work with legal/compliance teams to:
- Define what data is collected and how long it’s retained.
- Limit access to logs containing personal data.
- Notify stakeholders if monitoring crosses employee privacy expectations or contractual boundaries.
Performance and scaling
- Sharding: Distribute ingestion across multiple collectors to handle high event volumes.
- Backpressure: Use message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ) to buffer bursts and prevent data loss.
- Indexing strategy: Optimize search indexes (time-based, partitioned) for efficient queries over large datasets.
- Resource planning: Monitor CPU, memory, and disk I/O on agents and collectors to prevent monitoring from impacting file server performance.
Alternatives and comparison
| Feature | ShareWatcher | Generic FIM Tools | SIEM with File Connectors |
|---|---|---|---|
| SMB/NAS-focused | Yes | Varies | Varies |
| Real-time alerts | Yes | Sometimes | Yes (with configs) |
| Lightweight agent | Optional | Varies | Typically agent-heavy |
| Out-of-the-box SMB rules | Yes | No | No |
| Ease of deployment | Moderate | Varies | Often complex |
Example alert scenarios
- Mass modifications: 10,000 files modified within 5 minutes on a shared drive — possible ransomware.
- Unusual access: A marketing account accessing HR payroll directories overnight — potential insider data access.
- Tamper attempts: Repeated failed attempts to change retention settings or disable monitoring agents — likely attacker trying to cover tracks.
Setting up a simple ShareWatcher workflow
- Inventory shares to monitor and classify by sensitivity.
- Deploy agents to critical file servers; enable inotify/USN or configure SMB hooks.
- Define filters for noisy system files and baseline normal activity.
- Configure alert thresholds (e.g., X% of files changed in Y minutes).
- Integrate with SIEM and runbooks for automated containment (isolate host, disable account).
- Review alerts daily and refine rules.
Conclusion
ShareWatcher provides targeted visibility into file activity on network shares, making it valuable for security operations, compliance, and operational troubleshooting. Proper tuning, secure log handling, and integration with broader incident response tooling are essential to get maximum value while minimizing noise and privacy risks.