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>who connected to what mysql server and ran which queries

I'm pretty sure that is not really a hard task

It is quite common that sql servers run just with a few accounts. Helpful audit logs on critical systems have a high cost. So technically it is not hard but practically it is.

True but they can have systems which execute on the behalf of an authenticated user and pass that to the SQL server but the system in the middle would have logs of that query and by whom. Now, to be fair, there are usually holes that allow direct access as well.

I work in the public sector where we take these things fairly seriously, but it doesn’t really matter when the auditors are drowned in the vast amount of data.

We have 300 IT systems with 8000 users that take care of 700000 citizens. There is an ungodly amount of information on who accessed what and when. Data security, even post GDPR is a total illusion.

We’re working to build better access control, by indexing data and mapping user rights to job functions, but even then things are going to get lost in the audits.

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