At Elastic, we internally use, test, and provide feedback on all of our products. For example, the Information Security team is helping the Product team build a stronger solution for our customers. The InfoSec team is an extremely valuable resource who acts not only as an extension of Quality Assurance/Testing, but also as a data custodian.

Software performance issues come in all shapes and sizes. Therefore, performance tuning includes many aspects and subareas, and has to adopt a broad range of methodologies and techniques. Despite all this, time is one of the most critical measurements of software performance. In this multi-part series, I’ll focus on a few of the time-related aspects of software performance — particularly for security software.

The University of California at Davis is an agriculturally focused university of more than 30,000 students. Founded in 1905, the university performs federally funded research for the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and other agencies. It’s also home to an electric power substation, police and fire departments, and even an airport. All of this combined is a digital security challenge for Jeff Rowe, the university’s cybersecurity architect.

Security teams defending Windows environments often rely on anti-malware products as a first line of defense against malicious executables. Microsoft provides security vendors with the ability to register callbacks that will be invoked upon the creation of processes on the system. Driver developers can call APIs such as PsSetCreateProcessNotifyRoutineEx to receive such events.

It’s no secret that organisations are up against skilled, relentless and determined adversaries. Security operations teams need to continuously test their detection capabilities by carrying out adversary emulation plans that are made up of varying tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and track key metrics of their coverage in order to close any existing gaps. There are many tools available for running adversary emulation plans and performing purple team exercises.

The South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications (BIT) provides quality customer services and partnerships to ensure South Dakota’s IT organization is responsive, reliable, and well-aligned to support the state government’s business needs. The BIT believes that “People should be online, not waiting in line.” The bureau’s goals for the state's 885,000 residents include.

In an earlier blog post, we spoke about building your own ProblemChild framework from scratch in the Elastic Stack to detect living off the land (LOtL) activity. As promised, we have now also released a fully trained detection model, anomaly detection configurations, and detection rules that you can use to get ProblemChild up and running in your environment in a matter of minutes.

This quick blog is the first in a two-part series discussing a userland Windows exploit initially disclosed by James Forshaw and Alex Ionescu. The exploit enables attackers to perform highly privileged actions that typically require a kernel driver.