Illicit streaming devices have become an unnoticed yet significant threat in many households and corporate environments. These devices, often advertised with wild promises of free access to premium content, have a dark side that many users might not be aware of. They operate much like the “black boxes” of the 1990s, offering access to pay-per-view events and premium channels at suspiciously low costs.

Imagine, for a moment, that your IT environment is the Death Star. You know the rebels will try to rescue Princess Leia. If you’re Darth Vader, you need systems that detect Luke and Chewbacca when they gain unauthorized access and systems that prevent them from accessing the Death Star. As a security analyst, you have varied technologies that detect and prevent malicious actors from gaining unauthorized access to your networks.

While SIEM solutions have existed for decades now, the market has faced recent upheaval with the advent of cloud-native solutions and a surge of mergers and acquisitions in the last year. As the SIEM market undergoes seismic shifts, CrowdStrike and Cribl have joined forces to help SOCs with their modernization journey. We’re pleased to share that CrowdStrike and Cribl are expanding our partnership to help organizations take the next step in their SIEM journey.

Maintaining robust cybersecurity defenses comes with significant costs, but one area that often exceeds is the ongoing administration of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. The expenses associated with logging, storing, and managing SIEM data can escalate rapidly, especially when compounded by compliance and regulatory requirements. What are these hidden costs and how can you mitigate them while also ensuring compliance?

2024 was a thrilling year for Graylog Capture The Flag (CTF) events! Across major cybersecurity conferences, Graylog invited participants to test their skills in a range of challenging scenarios designed to simulate real-world cyber threats. From North America to Europe and beyond, we saw cybersecurity professionals and enthusiasts go head-to-head in Graylog CTFs, flexing their skills, deepening their knowledge, and having fun along the way.

In the modern IT ecosystem, securing containerized applications in environments like Kubernetes is vital. Tools like Falco help address this need by providing tooling that can be integrated within Elastic Security. Falco is a cloud-native security tool that provides runtime security across hosts, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud environments.

Being a security analyst today is hard. You’re constantly trying to protect your organization while feeling like attackers are always a step ahead of you. Every year, you seem to add more security technologies to your stack, yet you still find yourself facing tooling gaps. If only you had the ability to clearly compare different products and their capabilities, you think.

As I celebrate my first year as head of product management at Graylog, I’ve had the unique privilege of re-immersing myself in the world of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) from a new perspective. The past year has underscored one critical lesson: staying competitive in SIEM isn’t about adding features; it’s about finding fresh approaches to meet the real needs of security teams.

Elastic Security 8.16 is now available, advancing our mission to streamline security workflows with enhanced data accessibility and AI-driven analytics. Key updates include agentless onboarding for faster cloud security posture management (CSPM) and asset discovery; expanded integrations with Wiz, AWS Security Hub, and Falco for contextualized threat detection; custom knowledge sources for Elastic AI Assistant; and improved support for locally hosted large language models (LLMs).

Cyber threats are relentless, sophisticated, and growing. To stay ahead, you can no longer treat threat intelligence as an optional tool—it’s the backbone of a proactive, defense-ready strategy. Threat intelligence feeds bring crucial insights to security teams, from high-level trends to detailed indicators of compromise (IoCs). But no single feed can capture every potential threat. Threat landscapes evolve rapidly and adversaries employ diverse techniques and targets.

Cisco Umbrella is a platform for monitoring and maintaining the DNS-layer security across your network. It monitors network activity and detects behavior like DNS hijacking, spoofing, and other attacks. It can then reroute or block potentially malicious requests before they reach endpoints. However, while Umbrella’s DNS-layer security blocks malicious domains, the sheer volume of DNS and proxy logs it generates can overwhelm security teams.

Many organizations lack clear visibility into the efficiency of their security processes, making it difficult to accurately assess their security teams’ performance. Without insight into key factors like alert response speed, investigation thoroughness, and the accuracy of detection rules, teams risk operating without a clear view. This can lead to missed threats, inefficient use of resources, and an inability to improve security outcomes.

Everyone remembers that one required writing class they needed to take. If you’re like a lot of other security analysts, you assumed that your job would focus on using technology, not writing research papers. However, in today’s business environment, cyber incidents are critical business events, especially as governments and agencies create more reporting requirements.