Your security data is the most important asset in your SOC. Not the dashboards, not the detections, not the AI features on the roadmap slide. The data. And most vendors make you pay, wait, or license your way to getting it back out. Every investigation your analysts run, every model you train, every agent you deploy is only as good as the telemetry underneath it. So here is the question I want you to ask every vendor in your stack: if I want my data, right now, what does that take?Most vendors…
If you already ship Kubernetes (K8s) audit logs and Defend for Containers (D4C) into Elastic, you still have to join them by hand, and neither source is complete on its own. In our lab, a compromised workload service account ran discovery, read secrets, minted a token, created a privileged pod, and execed into it to attempt a container escape. The escape wrappers, nsenter and chroot, never appeared in the runtime process events. Kubernetes audit logs recorded them in the decoded requestURI.Real…
Fileless execution on Linux has moved from niche tradecraft into real-world intrusion chains. By executing payloads from memory or anonymous file descriptors, attackers can reduce on-disk artifacts and weaken controls that rely heavily on file inspection.In our own analysis of VoidLink, we observed how fileless execution can be paired with a rootkit. The loader scans for processes running from memfd and passes their PIDs to the rootkit, allowing an already running fileless implant to be hidden…
Elastic Defend 9.5.0 detects dynamic link library (DLL) search-order hijacking [1] in a single field. Writing that rule before 9.5.0 took about 88 lines, covering approximately 2,600 named libraries, 10 excluded Windows system paths, signature checks, and a drop-to-load time window. It now takes one: dll.Ext.defense_evasions: "DLL Hijack: Masquerading".DLL search-order hijacking, which Defend labels Masquerading, runs attacker code inside a legitimate process by abusing the order that Windows…
AI verdict correctness in our security operations center (SOC) is 92%, up from 60%, but we didn't switch models to get there. What we changed is the context the agents get before they decide anything, including the detection rule's investigation guide and user risk data from Workday, along with the closure reasons from 30 days of past cases on that same rule. This post covers how the agentic SOC pipeline is built in Elastic Workflows and Elastic Agent Builder, down to the prompts and the…
AI verdict correctness in our security operations center (SOC) is 92%, up from 60%, but we didn't switch models to get there. What we changed is the context the agents get before they decide anything, including the detection rule's investigation guide and user risk data from Workday, along with the closure reasons from 30 days of past cases on that same rule. This post covers how the agentic SOC pipeline is built in Elastic Workflows and Elastic Agent Builder, down to the prompts and the…
Open the entity analytics (EA) graph in Elastic Security and you'll see a user wired to the hosts they log in to and the devices they own, along with scattered accounts that turn out to be the same user. While interesting on its own, it provides a critical piece of context during a threat hunting or incident investigation. This post gives an overview of EA fundamentals and opens the hood to see how edges are drawn and accounts are resolved. Why is that important? Well, everything downstream,…
Open the entity analytics (EA) graph in Elastic Security and you'll see a user wired to the hosts they log in to and the devices they own, along with scattered accounts that turn out to be the same user. While interesting on its own, it provides a critical piece of context during a threat hunting or incident investigation. This post gives an overview of EA fundamentals and opens the hood to see how edges are drawn and accounts are resolved. Why is that important? Well, everything downstream,…
We gave hundreds of developers an AI agent that can run shell commands, edit files, and call Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers on their laptops, then realized we had no record of what it actually did. So we built one. One 280-line dependency-free bash script, fired by Cursor's hooks, records every tool call as JSONL, and the Elastic Agent already on each endpoint ships it to Elasticsearch. Since the May rollout we have logged over 13 million tool-call events from more than 1,100 machines. A…
We gave hundreds of developers an AI agent that can run shell commands, edit files, and call Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers on their laptops, then realized we had no record of what it actually did. So we built one. One 280-line dependency-free bash script, fired by Cursor's hooks, records every tool call as JSONL, and the Elastic Agent already on each endpoint ships it to Elasticsearch. Since the May rollout we have logged over 13 million tool-call events from more than 1,100 machines. A…
npm's min-release-age setting tells npm to ignore any package version published less than a set number of days ago, keeping freshly compromised releases out of npm install during the window when they do the most damage. Getting the setting onto developer workstations is straightforward. Knowing when someone quietly deletes it is a different problem entirely, and log-tailing inputs are no help because they only fire when lines are appended to a file. We built a ~40-line Common Expression…
npm's min-release-age setting tells npm to ignore any package version published less than a set number of days ago, keeping freshly compromised releases out of npm install during the window when they do the most damage. Getting the setting onto developer workstations is straightforward. Knowing when someone quietly deletes it is a different problem entirely, and log-tailing inputs are no help because they only fire when lines are appended to a file. We built a ~40-line Common Expression…
An agentic SOC is only as good as the model driving it. The moment you let an LLM triage an alert, hunt across your telemetry, or author a detection rule, the question stops being "is this a smart model?" and becomes something much more specific: will it pick the right skill, call the right tool in the right order, and reach the right disposition without inventing a result it never actually checked? That is not a question a general-purpose leaderboard can answer. A model can top every public…
An agentic SOC is only as good as the model driving it. The moment you let an LLM triage an alert, hunt across your telemetry, or author a detection rule, the question stops being "is this a smart model?" and becomes something much more specific: will it pick the right skill, call the right tool in the right order, and reach the right disposition without inventing a result it never actually checked? That is not a question a general-purpose leaderboard can answer. A model can top every public…
Large language models (LLMs) made it trivially cheap to generate vulnerability reports. In the first half of 2026 alone, our HackerOne bug bounty program received over 1,390 reports, more than the full-year totals for 2024 and 2025 combined. Every one of them still requires human attention, so we decided to put agents against agents. If AI can generate reports at near-zero cost, AI should triage them at near-zero cost, too. The system we built agrees with human security engineers 85% of the…
Large language models (LLMs) made it trivially cheap to generate vulnerability reports. In the first half of 2026 alone, our HackerOne bug bounty program received over 1,390 reports, more than the full-year totals for 2024 and 2025 combined. Every one of them still requires human attention, so we decided to put agents against agents. If AI can generate reports at near-zero cost, AI should triage them at near-zero cost, too. The system we built agrees with human security engineers 85% of the…
Elastic Security now tracks every change to a detection rule and lets you roll back to any previous version with one click. The same history log gives compliance teams a timestamped audit trail that's immutable and append-only. Case data is queryable across 3 global indices (down from 12 per space), so SOC managers can build dashboards on closure rates, assignment load, and case volume without configuring anything. A rebuilt template system gives analysts structured, investigation-specific…
Elastic Security now tracks every change to a detection rule and lets you roll back to any previous version with one click. The same history log gives compliance teams a timestamped audit trail that's immutable and append-only. Case data is queryable across 3 global indices (down from 12 per space), so SOC managers can build dashboards on closure rates, assignment load, and case volume without configuring anything. A rebuilt template system gives analysts structured, investigation-specific…
At Elastic, we know that the best way to build security tools is to bring them to the community, have security pros use them, and let them tell us what features and functionality matter and why. This year, we’re excited to do this at Black Hat and DEFCON, the weeklong security marathon affectionately known as Hacker Summer Camp. Our smartest technical experts and practitioners will be at Black Hat showing off our latest innovations, sponsoring and hosting events to help security experts and…
At Elastic, we know that the best way to build security tools is to bring them to the community, have security pros use them, and let them tell us what features and functionality matter and why. This year, we’re excited to do this at Black Hat and DEFCON, the weeklong security marathon affectionately known as Hacker Summer Camp. Our smartest technical experts and practitioners will be at Black Hat showing off our latest innovations, sponsoring and hosting events to help security experts and…
Hugging Face reconstructed more than 17,000 attacker events from a July 2026 intrusion driven by an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. The path was familiar: untrusted dataset content abused a processing worker (file disclosure, then code execution), credential harvest, then multi-cluster lateral movement. Production Elastic Defend behavior rules and Elastic Security detection (SIEM) rules already watch those types of behaviors. This post maps each stage to detections you can enable…
We know you’re tired of hearing how every vendor is going to finally help you solve alert fatigue. Well, one way we’re improving alert fatigue is from a slightly different angle, better prevention at the endpoint. Because stopping more at the endpoint means fewer alerts ever raised. We have three endpoint enhancements, all contributing to better endpoint prevention: To be even more proactive about Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks, we’re continuously monitoring public vulnerable…
It's 9 a.m. Monday, the start of your shift. You begin the day like any other Monday: You open the queue, and the wall of alerts is already waiting. New alerts land between 9:05 and 9:10 a.m., while you close yesterday’s. You're already drowning, and you haven’t even had a chance to refill your coffee. You know that you won’t be able to get to things that really need prioritization. Threat hunting stays deferred, and detection engineering waits. Incident response practice never quite starts.…
We know you’re tired of hearing how every vendor is going to finally help you solve alert fatigue. Well, one way we’re improving alert fatigue is from a slightly different angle, better prevention at the endpoint. Because stopping more at the endpoint means fewer alerts ever raised. We have three endpoint enhancements, all contributing to better endpoint prevention: To be even more proactive about Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks, we’re continuously monitoring public vulnerable…
It's 9 a.m. Monday, the start of your shift. You begin the day like any other Monday: You open the queue, and the wall of alerts is already waiting. New alerts land between 9:05 and 9:10 a.m., while you close yesterday’s. You're already drowning, and you haven’t even had a chance to refill your coffee. You know that you won’t be able to get to things that really need prioritization. Threat hunting stays deferred, and detection engineering waits. Incident response practice never quite starts.…
Elastic automatically translates your Microsoft Sentinel detection rules into Elastic Security. Export your Scheduled and Near Real Time (NRT) analytics rules from Sentinel, upload them, and Elastic picks up the mapping and translation from there using an LLM you choose. Watchlists and severity mappings carry over. This is the first automatic migration path off a modern SIEM, available now in Tech Preview in 9.5, and it works across multiple cloud providers and regions so you can deploy closer…
Elastic automatically translates your Microsoft Sentinel detection rules into Elastic Security. Export your Scheduled and Near Real Time (NRT) analytics rules from Sentinel, upload them, and Elastic picks up the mapping and translation from there using an LLM you choose. Watchlists and severity mappings carry over. This is the first automatic migration path off a modern SIEM, available now in Tech Preview in 9.5, and it works across multiple cloud providers and regions so you can deploy closer…
This is Part 3 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it · Part 2: Choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction We run 14 AI agents in the Elastic InfoSec security operations pipeline. They were producing correct verdicts and taking up to 19 large language model (LLM) calls to do work that needed 8, at thousands of input tokens per call. At hundreds of runs per day, that compounds fast. We built a five-step…
This is Part 3 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it · Part 2: Choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction We run 14 AI agents in the Elastic InfoSec security operations pipeline. They were producing correct verdicts and taking up to 19 large language model (LLM) calls to do work that needed 8, at thousands of input tokens per call. At hundreds of runs per day, that compounds fast. We built a five-step…
This is Part 2 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60%. Investigating a Windows endpoint alert in Elastic InfoSec's production agentic security operations center (SOC) costs $0.69. That's what we pay running an orchestration workflow of specialized Elastic AI agents on the Elastic Inference Service (EIS). Route the same alert to a single agent working through 14 skills, and the…
This is Part 2 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60%. Investigating a Windows endpoint alert in Elastic InfoSec's production agentic security operations center (SOC) costs $0.69. That's what we pay running an orchestration workflow of specialized Elastic AI agents on the Elastic Inference Service (EIS). Route the same alert to a single agent working through 14 skills, and the…
We ran a noisy wget detection rule on Elastic's own cloud fleet for seven days. Three destinations survived deterministic filtering, Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL) COMPLETION triaged all three, and none of them created an alert that an analyst had to open. Each rule parses the destination from curl and wget executions, filters known-good hosts, redacts secrets, and then hands whatever’s left to a large language model (LLM) for a triage verdict. File transfer detections stay on in cloud…
We ran a noisy wget detection rule on Elastic's own cloud fleet for seven days. Three destinations survived deterministic filtering, Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL) COMPLETION triaged all three, and none of them created an alert that an analyst had to open. Each rule parses the destination from curl and wget executions, filters known-good hosts, redacts secrets, and then hands whatever’s left to a large language model (LLM) for a triage verdict. File transfer detections stay on in cloud…
This is Part 1 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 2: choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60% Elastic's InfoSec team built an agentic SOC that triages every alert before an analyst opens it. A 30-minute manual investigation now finishes in under 3 minutes: deterministic ES|QL queries close obvious false positives at zero token cost, specialized AI agents investigate the rest across endpoint, cloud, and SaaS…
This is Part 1 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 2: choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60% Elastic's InfoSec team built an agentic SOC that triages every alert before an analyst opens it. A 30-minute manual investigation now finishes in under 3 minutes: deterministic ES|QL queries close obvious false positives at zero token cost, specialized AI agents investigate the rest across endpoint, cloud, and SaaS…
Elastic's InfoSec Product Security Team built a generative AI agent using Elastic Agent Builder that drafts complete CVE security advisories (CWE classification, CAPEC methodology, CVSS scoring, and mitigation guidance) directly from raw vulnerability reports. The agent uses RAG against the MITRE CWE and CAPEC catalogues indexed in Elasticsearch, which grounds its output in authoritative data and prevents hallucinated classification IDs. ESA-2026-01 is already in production as an example of…
Elastic Security natively ingests Google Threat Intelligence: known-malicious IPs, domains, URLs, and file hashes matched against your telemetry the moment they appear, each carrying a verdict and a 0–100 threat score. The setup consists of an API key and two data streams, with no extra infrastructure. When an indicator is ambiguous, workflows built on Agent Builder query VirusTotal in real time, enrich the alert, correlate with your telemetry, and summarize findings in real time. How threat…
Every SOC analyst knows the drill: an alert fires, and the next ten minutes are spent switching between a triage dashboard, a threat hunt, a case file, and the AI tool that told you to look in the first place. Recently, we introduced MCP Apps for Elastic, built on the open MCP Apps extension to the Model Context Protocol, that lets an MCP tool return an interactive UI alongside its text response, rendered inline in Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, VS Code Copilot, Cursor, or any compatible host. This…
Introduction Self-hosted services exposed through a reverse proxy inevitably attract automated scanners probing for misconfigurations, admin panels, and vulnerable endpoints. In this article, I show how to turn routine Traefik access logs into an active defensive control using Elastic Security and Cloudflare. I use an out-of-the-box ES|QL detection rule to identify web server discovery and fuzzing behavior. When suspicious probing patterns are detected, an automated workflow immediately blocks…
Elastic Workflows is generally available in 9.4. It is the automation layer built directly into Elastic, running where your data lives across Security, Observability, and Search. While this post focuses on a security deep dive, the same workflow capabilities apply across solutions, with no separate platform to deploy and no data to move. When an alert fires or a schedule triggers, a Workflow executes: querying Elasticsearch, enriching with threat intel, creating cases, calling external APIs,…
Elastic Security v9.4 introduces Entity Analytics Watchlists, a new capability in the Entity Analytics suite that lets security teams create named, weighted lists of users, hosts, and services and feed that context directly into the platform's risk scoring pipeline. The gap this closes isn't awareness, as most security teams already know which entities deserve elevated scrutiny. The gap is that SIEMs have had no way to express that organizational knowledge as a risk signal. Watchlists do that…
Threat hunting has always been a human art; a practitioner staring at logs, forming a hypothesis, and patiently chasing it down. What if the hardest part of the hunt (knowing where to look) could be done for you, automatically, in milliseconds, and tuned specifically to your environment? This is where AI-generated hunting leads come in, allowing you to shift from reactive alerting to proactive defense with entity-centric, risk-based threat hunting tailored specifically to your environment's…
There's an uncomfortable truth in security analytics that nobody talks about at conferences: The quality of your detections, alerts, and investigations is only as good as the entity records that represent the users, hosts, and services in your environment. Not the machine learning models. Not the anomaly detection algorithms. Not the risk scoring engine. The entities: the foundations to teach your system about the data and protect it. Get the entities wrong, and everything downstream is…
Elastic Security now includes AI-powered detection rule creation, built into the rule creation workflow. Analysts describe a threat behavior in plain English and receive a complete, validated Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL) rule in return, with MITRE ATT\&CK mappings, severity recommendations, and a preview against live data, all without leaving the platform or writing a single line of query syntax. This post walks through exactly how that works using an Okta credential stuffing and…
Entity Analytics is a core security analytics capability that extends Elastic Security from event-centric to entity-centric investigation. By focusing on critical entities, such as users, hosts, and services, it builds a complete profile of each entity’s attributes, lifecycle, behaviors, relationships, and risk score over time. This security context equips threat hunters to stop chasing isolated alerts and instead uncover the full narrative of a potential compromise. In this blog, we walk…
Three things land on you at once: Attack Discovery correlated 12 alerts into a credential-harvesting campaign overnight, your team just onboarded a new fleet of macOS endpoints and needs detection rules for LOLBin abuse, and a risk score spike on a service account just crossed the critical threshold. In most security operations centers (SOCs), that's three different people, three different workflows, and a morning spent context-switching. In Elastic Security 9.4, it's one conversation. You open…
Modern DFIR doesn't start with a disk image. That model worked when environments were smaller, endpoints were static, and time wasn't the primary constraint. Endpoints are now ephemeral, fleets scale to thousands of hosts, and attackers operate on timelines measured in minutes. By the time a full forensic image is collected, the system may no longer exist. Forensics today is no longer about collecting everything. It's about asking the right questions, in real time, across your entire…
As AI coding assistants become standard tools in engineering workflows, security teams face a new challenge: how do you maintain visibility into what an AI agent is doing (and why) across your organization? When those agents can execute shell commands, read files, call APIs, and interact with internal systems via MCP connectors, you need real-time observability to support threat detection, incident response, and compliance. This post walks through how Elastic's InfoSec team built a monitoring…
A quarterly look at Elastic’s security integrations ecosystem Security teams can only protect what they can see. Gaps in coverage, like a macOS fleet generating logs that never reach your SIEM, an email gateway running in isolation, or a cloud environment producing findings that stay siloed in the vendor console, are easily exploited by attackers. Elastic’s answer to this is continuous and open investment in third-party integrations, built on the belief that a strong security ecosystem requires…
At Elastic, we operate a large and diverse set of behavior detection rules across multiple datasets, environments, and severity levels. Most of these rules are atomic, each designed to detect a specific behavior, signal, or attack pattern. In addition, we ingest and promote external alerts from security integrations such as firewalls, EDR, WAF, and other security controls. The result is powerful visibility but also significant alert volume. From our telemetry, even when considering only non…
Preamble Security investigations rarely stay confined to a single host. Today’s attackers increasingly use automation and AI to compress multi-stage attacks into minutes, turning what once unfolded over days into coordinated activity across endpoints, identities, workloads, and cloud services within minutes. While many attacks begin on an endpoint, investigators must quickly determine how that activity spreads across the environment. In many environments, per-endpoint licensing limits how…
The daily loop An alert fires. You open it. You read through the details. You gather context from the surrounding activity. You check for related signals across your environment. You decide what it means and what to do next. Sometimes you escalate. Sometimes you close it and move on. You do this dozens of times a day. The steps are almost always the same. The data you need is already in your SIEM. The actions you take are predictable. But the work is still manual. This is the kind of work that…
The term Agentic SOC (Security Operations Center) is one of the most popular concepts in security today. But what does it truly mean in practice, and how does Elastic Security approach this next evolution of security operations? In simple terms, an Agentic SOC is a security operations center that has deployed AI Agents and corresponding AI Agent Skills to perform SOC-related workflows such as detection engineering, alert triage, incident investigation, escalation, response, and threat hunting.…
Preamble The landscape of cybersecurity is evolving, and the role of the Detection Engineer (DE) is more critical and demanding than ever. Traditionally, this role involves a comprehensive, end-to-end workflow: from threat modeling and telemetry tuning to writing, testing, and maintaining performance-optimized detection rules to flag malicious behavior. Elastic Security is purpose-built to streamline this entire workflow, empowering DEs - and anyone involved in security operations - to build,…
Introduction Linux systems remain a critical foundation for modern infrastructure, particularly in cloud-native environments where containers and orchestration platforms are the norm. As workloads move from long-lived hosts to ephemeral containers, attacker tradecraft shifts as well. Activity that once left persistent artifacts on disk is increasingly confined to short-lived, runtime behavior that can be difficult to capture using traditional log sources. Detection engineering in these…
Get started with Elastic Security from your AI agent Elastic Agent Skills are open source packages that give your AI coding agent native Elastic expertise. If you're already using Elastic Agent Builder, you get AI agents that work natively with your security data. Agent Skills are for the other side: bringing that same Elastic Security knowledge to the external AI tools your team already uses, like Cursor, Claude Code, or GitHub Copilot. If you use an AI coding agent and want to evaluate…
At the core of Elastic Security lie outstanding detection capabilities, allowing users to create, test, tune, manage, deploy detection rules, as code, in their environments. The ability to create robust detections is critical for Security Operations as detection logic elevates threat signal from the telemetry noise. This article highlights how Elastic's new Terraform resources for security detection rules and exceptions expand practitioners' capabilities for detection-as-code deployment. Below…