The first Elastic Global Threat Report was published earlier this week. In it, you will learn about trends observed by our threat researchers, our predictions for what’s coming next, and some of our recommendations to operate securely in the face of today’s and tomorrow’s threats. If you haven’t read it yet, go check it out. As a technical leader in Elastic Security, I'd like to reveal a small amount about what goes into reports like this one and why it’s significant.

I remember where I was sitting when I read Mandiant’s first M-Trends report on the advanced persistent threat in 2010. I was a technical director at the National Security Agency in the office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). At that time, my job was to build computer network exploitation (CNE) tools to collect foreign intelligence.

Staying up-to-date on the current state of security and understanding the implications of today’s growing threat landscape is critical to my role as CISO at Elastic. Part of this includes closely following the latest security threat reports, highlighting trends, and offering valuable insights into methods bad actors use to compromise environments.

K-12 school districts in the U.S. are struggling with cybersecurity. According to an October 2022 GAO report, ransomware attacks have cost schools up to three weeks of missed learning. The GAO also noted that recovery can take as long as nine months. In January 2021, 3,000 K-12 public schools in the U.S. were victim to a large-scale worldwide cyberattack.

In this post, I want to scratch at the surface of a very interesting technology that Elastic’s Universal Profiler and Security solution both use called eBPF and explain why it is a critically important technology for modern observability. I’ll talk a little bit about how it works and how it can be used to create powerful monitoring solutions — and dream up ways eBPF could be used in the future for observability use cases.

For far too long, the cybersecurity industry has subscribed to a flawed methodology — one that is based on the notion that organizations can avoid security threats through obscurity and secrecy. The assumption is that keeping security controls and processes covert makes products and data inherently more secure against cyber threats within the networks we defend. However, even the most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses are no match for well-funded, highly motivated adversaries.

With Elastic 8.5, we are excited to announce that the Cloud Workload and Posture capabilities are now generally available with this release! As organizations move rapidly to adopt newer cloud technologies, security teams are tasked with protecting their organization’s assets and data across various platforms — including endpoints, cloud, and on-prem environments.