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…
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…
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…
AAD Graph Activity Logs are now ingestible into Elastic and usable for threat detection within the SIEM/XDR solution. That sentence shouldn't be exciting, but it is. For most of the past decade, this slice of telemetry simply didn't exist as a customer-accessible log stream. Microsoft Graph Activity Logs (the modern graph.microsoft.com surface) went GA in April 2024. The legacy graph.windows.net surface, the one adversary tooling actually hits, stayed dark until early 2026. This post walks the…
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…
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…
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…
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…