Logging and audit trails in Cybersecurity - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Logging and Audit Trails

📖 Scenario: You work as a security analyst. Your job is to keep track of user actions on a system. This helps detect problems and keeps a record of what happened.

🎯 Goal: Create a simple logging system that records user actions with timestamps. You will build a list of logs, add a filter for important actions, and then display the filtered logs.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called user_actions with exact user action entries.

Add a variable called important_action to filter logs.

Use a list comprehension to create filtered_logs with only important actions.

Print the filtered_logs list.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Logging user actions helps detect security issues and keeps a record for audits.

💼 Career

Security analysts and DevOps engineers use logging to monitor system activity and investigate incidents.

1

Create the initial user actions list

Create a list called user_actions with these exact entries: 'login', 'view_page', 'edit_profile', 'logout', 'delete_account'.

Cybersecurity

# Create the user_actions list with the exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and include the exact strings separated by commas.

2

Add a filter for important actions

Create a variable called important_action and set it to the string 'delete_account'.

Cybersecurity

user_actions = ['login', 'view_page', 'edit_profile', 'logout', 'delete_account']
# Create the important_action variable with the exact value
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'delete_account' to the variable important_action.

3

Filter logs for important actions

Use a list comprehension to create a list called filtered_logs that includes only entries from user_actions equal to important_action.

Cybersecurity

user_actions = ['login', 'view_page', 'edit_profile', 'logout', 'delete_account']
important_action = 'delete_account'
# Create filtered_logs using a list comprehension filtering user_actions by important_action
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the syntax: [item for item in list if condition] to filter the list.

4

Display the filtered logs

Write a print statement to display the filtered_logs list.

Cybersecurity

user_actions = ['login', 'view_page', 'edit_profile', 'logout', 'delete_account']
important_action = 'delete_account'
filtered_logs = [action for action in user_actions if action == important_action]
# Print the filtered_logs list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(filtered_logs) to show the filtered list.