Financially motivated adversary groups executing ransomware attacks have rightfully gotten our attention in recent years. Similar to Lulzec, there’s a new group catching attention with different motivations, targeting larger organizations.

For security and DevOps teams, staying a step ahead of the competition comes down to staying in lockstep with each other. Whether that competition takes the form of a threat actor lurking on a network or a rival company taking new products to market, collaboration can help security and DevOps teams better protect their organizations and develop innovative technology solutions.

In recent days, several security vendors have published blogs about the Linux-based exploitation (CVE-2022-0847), also known as Dirty Pipe. The Elastic Security Research team is sharing the first detailed research to help organizations find and alert on the exploitation with Elastic Security products. We are releasing this research so that users can defend themselves, since very little information has been shared on the actual detection of exploitation attempts.

Machine learning (ML) detections are a powerful tool for detecting emerging threats when we don’t yet know what we’re looking for. The power of anomaly detection is the ability to detect and provide early warning on new threat activity for which rules, indicators, or signatures are not yet available.

Many organizations consider the AV-Comparatives' test series a standard of quality and a guarantee of a reliable product. Recently, Elastic participated successfully in the AV-Comparatives’ Enterprise Main Test Series and received the Approved Product award. This prestigious and industry-recognized quality award means that the Elastic Security software has been rigorously checked to ensure that it will perform its intended task competently.

With the release of Elastic Security 8.1, enhance defenses against novel attacks like Log4Shell and prevent adversaries from compromising macOS systems. Achieve visibility into host-based network activity, leverage new sources of threat intelligence, collect data from across your enterprise, and more. Let’s jump in.

Elastic Security discovered PHOREAL malware, which is targeting Southeast Asia financial organizations, particularly those in the Vietnamese financial sector. Given the continuous pace of malware development, it's no surprise that adversarial groups will leverage successful campaigns as the basis of developing future attacks, and the recently discovered backdoor campaign targeting Vietnamese financial services is no exception.

Recently, we have seen several malware campaigns attacking Ukrainian organizations — Operation Bleeding Bear is a recent one of note. Elastic Security researchers recently verified a data wiper malware campaign that is targeting Ukrainian systems. As this malware campaign is new, with more information being uncovered hourly, it is being referred to as HERMETICWIPER.

Readers Note : This is a summarized post of a detailed write up by the Elastic Security Intelligence and Analytics team. A deep dive on UAC Bypass is available to read here.

We wanted to call out some great adjacent research from the team at Sophoslabs Uncut that was released on December 21, 2021. Research groups frequently analyze similar (or in this case, identical) campaigns through their own unique lens. This is fantastic for the security community, as the campaign gets more eyes and different perspectives applied towards the same problem.