Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

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.

When we hear the term “Credential Access” our detection engineer thoughts typically turn to the Windows LSASS Process and tools like Mimikatz. Recently, however, researchers have drawn our attention to Microsoft Office processes. These processes also store credential material, in the form of access tokens.

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.

When delivering customer experiences from the cloud, defending the app includes the data it houses and the business it represents. The DevSecOps mindset, “You build it, you run it, you secure it” helps, but only when all teams are empowered with the info they need to see a threat, regardless of where it is.

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.