TSA Security Directives for Surface Transportation

Rules catch what you already thought of. Behavioural models baseline every user and application against their own history and their peer group, then score deviations in real time — so a service account reading tables it has never touched surfaces without anyone having written a rule for it first. That is what makes monitoring hold up as access patterns change, instead of decaying into a ruleset nobody maintains.

Notification clocks start when you become aware, so detection latency is the whole exposure. Behavioural baselines score each deviation as it happens and flag it in under a second, rather than surfacing it in a weekly review. Severity is decided at the collector and routed immediately, so the window between the access and someone knowing about it is measured in seconds — and the audit trail behind it already holds what was reached, by whom, and when.

Authorisation is configured in the database; proving it holds is what this requirement actually needs. Vulnerability scanning surfaces excessive privilege and role sprawl, default and weak credentials, and stale or orphaned accounts — including privilege inherited through nested roles, which is where least-privilege reviews usually go wrong. Real-time SQL auditing then shows which of those grants were exercised, so an access review reflects observed use rather than intent.

Retention obligations are easy to state and expensive to meet, because the cost is in keeping the record queryable rather than merely stored. Audit events land in columnar storage on immutable object storage, so a multi-year window costs object-storage prices and is still searchable in seconds when an examiner asks for a sample. Each record carries a verification hash, so what you produce years later is demonstrably what was written at the time.