With the rise of security threats comes an increased need for strong security measures, but it’s hard to know where to invest your time and money, especially if you’re a small startup. Who should own security when you first get started? Is it worth it to hire a Chief Security Officer (CSO) right away? Is it better to build out an internal security team or hire an external agency instead?

Below is a pie chart representing the percentage contribution of each data breach victim to the 57 largest data breaches of all time. CAM4 covers the majority of the pie, accounting for almost 50% of all compromised records. If the CAM4 breach is disregarded, the impacts of the other breaches can be better appreciated. The pie chart below represents this updated distribution. Now, it becomes clearer that LinkedIn accounts for the majority of compromised social media records.

Back in June, I wrote about the Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) new security directive concerning pipeline owners and operators. The order mandated those entities to disclose security incidents such as the ransomware attack that affected the Colonial Pipeline Company back in May to the TSA and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Account takeover (ATO) is a dangerous form of business email compromise (BEC). Attackers gain access to a legitimate email account within an organisation, often by stealing credentials through spear phishing. They’ll then send emails from the compromised account with the goal of getting a fraudulent payment authorised or accessing sensitive data to exfiltrate.

As a powerful search engine, Elasticsearch provides various ways to collect and enrich data with threat intel feeds, while the Elastic Security detection engine helps security analysts to detect alerts with threat indicator matching. In this blog post, we’ll provide an introduction to threat intelligence and demonstrate how Elastic Security can help organizations establish robust cyber threat intelligence (CTI) capabilities.