So, recently I had the need to setup auditing on a local workstation to try and determine who or what was deleting a specific set of files. Before we started, we decided to test the auditing on a couple PCs to audit all failed and successful attempts to delete any files or folders within some random test folder. Audit events are recorded in the Security logs of the Windows Event Viewer. Specifically, Audit Object Access events of interest are event ID 4656 (A handle to an object was requested) and 4663 (An attempt was made to access an object). The details should allude to the responsible user account and process. But to our surprise our test folder was not recording any audit events for any of the objects inside.
Maybe an oversight but perhaps auditing was not enabled in group policy. But a quick check revealed that it was being set for both success and failure:
Maybe it wasn’t getting applied to the workstation. Although deprecated since Vista, RSOP from the command line is useful for quickly spotting polices that might not be getting applied to the local computer. Sure enough I could see there was a problem with the audit policies: “The policy engine did not attempt to configure the setting…”
Windows Explored 