Protecting data and protecting business continuity are both similar and different. In a data driven world, your mission as a security analyst is to prevent threat actors from gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. Simultaneously, you also need to investigate incidents rapidly, ensuring that critical services experience as little downtime as possible.

Detecting and remediating security threats is a constantly evolving concern for modern DevSecOps and security operations center (SOC) teams. Moreover, manually investigating and responding to vulnerabilities and threats is time-consuming, laborious, and knowledge-intensive.

This is the first post in a series on the pillars outlined in the new US National Cybersecurity Strategy. I review each pillar in turn, and then discuss how services such as Devo can help address the challenges outlined in that pillar.

In a world where attackers can move fast, security teams need to move faster. According to SANS research from 2022, adversaries can perform intrusion actions within a five-hour window. While analysts need the Millennium Falcon of security technologies that enable threat detection and response in under twelve parsecs, increasingly complex IT environments make the 1-10-60 Framework feel unachievable.

It's no surprise that organizations are moving to the cloud to innovate — to meet the growing demands of their customers and digital transformation. Organizations want to build applications that are fast and scalable. They want to make use of the latest cloud-native capabilities like containers, orchestrators, microservices, APIs, and declarative infrastructure. However, this also means security in the cloud cannot be an afterthought.

With so many overlapping and self-serving definitions of XDR (Extended Detection and Response), embracing the innovations in technology first require that we parse the alphabet soup. We agree with several industry analysts covering the space that XDR is a vendor push with no real customer demand, but the problem spaces within XDR are of significant customer interest. Consensus has emerged on a few XDR elements such as: cloud-native/SaaS, improved detection, and improved response.

When ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, it ushered in new points of view and sentiments around AI adoption. Workers from nearly every industry started to reimagine how they could accomplish daily tasks and execute their work — and the cybersecurity industry was no exception. Like shadow IT, new rogue AI tools — meaning AI tools that employees are adopting unbeknownst to the organization they work for — can pose security risks to your organization.

The efficiency, security, and scalability of cloud operations are driving financial institutions’ adoption of the technology faster than ever before. The ability to meet customers where they want to transact, personalize solutions, and leverage new data and analytics solutions (including AI) on-demand is driving this growth. In fact, according to Accenture, the banking industry's workloads in the cloud more than doubled from 2021 to 2022.

In the second part of our breaking down the Elastic Global Threat Report series, we’re focusing on the credential access tactic, which was the third-most common category of behavior we observed. Roughly 10% of all techniques we saw involved one form of credential theft or another and dissecting this class of behaviors is helpful both to improve our understanding of threats and to better understand enterprise risks.