Key Takeaways Two real-world cloud attacks reached meaningful impact in less than ten minutes despite pursuing entirely different objectives. Both attackers treated the environment as a connected system, using existing permissions and relationships to expand their reach. Reconnaissance increasingly focuses on understanding access and capability rather than discovering vulnerable assets. AI is compressing the gap between discovery, decision-making, and execution for cloud attackers. The interval…
See agentic security operations governance in action: Huntress' AI SOC lets Athena investigate and act autonomously within guardrails our human analysts set.
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…
Compare the top LLM security tools for AI applications, including Aikido, Snyk, Semgrep, Endor Labs, and Wiz, across code, supply chain, and runtime. Category: DevSec Tools & Comparisons
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…
An AI agent has run a ransomware intrusion on its own for the first time, from break-in to data destruction. The autonomous attacks TrendAI™ Research predicted are beginning to arrive, and defending against them shifts from blocking known indicators to detecting behavior.
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…
The ransomware economy has been rewired. Meet the eight ransomware groups driving the shift, from affiliate breakaways to AI-assisted attacks based on Group-IB Threat Intelligence.
We’re looking forward to having some great conversations with those of you heading to the desert for Hacker Summer Camp 2026. We have a presence within the Cisco and Splunk booth (2633) during Black Hat where you can chat to us about our latest threat research, incident response, and how Talos powers the Cisco portfolio with our intelligence.Or, feel free to pretend to want to talk to us about those things while grabbing a new multicolored Snorty. That’s fine, too.Here’s some of the ways we’ll…
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…
In April, SentinelLABS’ Tom Hegel published an initial assessment of the first five weeks of the conflict. Three months later, the evidence supports refinement. Executive Summary The cyber risk remains quieter than the public narrative. It rests on persistent access, trusted administration, service-provider pathways, selective disruption, and personas that magnify technical effects. Iran-linked activity is not a single threat set. MOIS, the IRGC Intelligence Organization, the IRGC Cyber…
Learn how Huntress' AI signal triage and AI-powered SOC triage cut noise before it reaches human analysts. And discover why that matters for response times.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don’t mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability research. If you were like me, and guesstimating exactly when that shoe would drop, my money was on the middle of summer. And... well, friends, I hate to say it, but I was right. This July’s Patch Tuesday is…
Written by: Jules Czarniak Introduction As highlighted in the Mandiant M-Trends 2026 report, the mean time-to-exploit (TTE) has dropped to -7 days, meaning vulnerabilities are often exploited a week before a patch even exists. To keep pace, many security teams are exploring how to integrate large language model (LLM) agents into their codebases, development environments and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for automated vulnerability discovery and remediation.…
For years, the cyber security industry tracked AI as a force multiplier: something that made existing attack techniques faster, cheaper, and more accessible. That framing was accurate. But the Annual AI Security Report 2026 from Check Point Research documents a transition that goes further. AI has crossed from assistant to operator. Where it once helped attackers prepare, it now runs the operation. Key observed findings AI has crossed from development aid to live attack operator. It now does…
TrendAI™ Research analyzed over 200 Gemini CLI session logs showing how a Russian-speaking threat actor used AI to run a live botnet, finishing a full C&C migration in six minutes while doing just 11% of the work himself.
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…
TrendAI™ integrates the Claude Compliance API into TrendAI Vision One™ through two collectors that bring AI-aware visibility and detection to Claude Enterprise usage: one keeps all data inside the environment, while the other feeds TrendAI Vision One™ for deeper correlation and compliance.
Resilience, identity, and practical AI led the conversation at Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2026. Here are five key takeaways security leaders should act on.
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…
Elastic Security Labs's prior coverage of REF6598 documented an intrusion set whose Windows toolchain landed via Obsidian plugin abuse, escalated via an in-memory PE loader (PHANTOMPULL), and finished with a RAT (PHANTOMPULSE). That post focused on delivery. This post analyzes the final stage: PHANTOMPULSE, an implant that ships three process-injection techniques, resolves its C2 through Ethereum/Base/Optimism transaction inputs, and bypasses UAC via the public schuac technique. The analysis…
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…
TrendAI™ Research has identified two emerging threat campaigns—SHADOW-AETHER-040 and SHADOW-AETHER-064—that use agentic AI to drive intrusion operations against government and financial organizations in Latin America, marking these among the first cases we have observed of AI agents executing attacks from initial access to data exfiltration.
A deeper look at the first three pillars and outlining how our capabilities directly support government agencies working to bring this strategy to life.
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,…
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…
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…
AI agents writing your code. Aikido integrates directly into AWS Kiro's agentic workflow to keep security in the loop, automatically, from the first line. Aikido is AWS's first global security partner for Kiro. Category: Product & Company Updates
Preamble In 2025 and 2026, we watched a pattern play out across the industry. Attackers stopped going after production servers directly and started targeting the automation that deploys to them. Compromised developer credentials, a modified workflow file, and suddenly every secret in a CI/CD environment is streaming to an attacker-controlled endpoint. We saw this play out across incidents involving major open-source projects, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure tooling. The…
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…
Key Takeaways We identified an exposed server that provided unusual visibility into a large-scale, multi-victim exploitation and collection operation. Artifacts on the host showed that Claude Code and OpenClaw were embedded in the operator’s day-to-day workflow, supporting troubleshooting, orchestration, and refinement of the collection pipeline. This AI-assisted workflow resulted in the modular platform Bissa scanner […] The post Bissa Scanner Exposed: AI-Assisted Mass Exploitation and…
Attackers are building workflows around AI—fake tools, spoofed answers, and machine-speed phishing. See how Huntress is tracking this shift and what it means for defenders.
Introduction Over the past few years, we have observed a significant evolution in the capabilities of LLMs to be productive and to carry out various tasks that address real-world problems, such as program synthesis, malware research, or vulnerability research. Specifically in the context of reverse engineering, LLMs are particularly effective given the right tools because they are very good at reading source code even without symbols. Not only that, thanks to their knowledge, they are capable…
A Linux user recently tried to respond to potentially malicious behavior on their machine using OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, before installing the Huntress agent. What ensued shows the unexpected impacts of this AI use case on DFIR investigations.
Preamble Last Monday night I was working late and a Slack alert came in from a monitoring tool I had built three days earlier. Axios compromised; one of the most popular npm packages in the world. My heart started racing, I knew every second mattered to respond and limit the damage. But honestly it was so crazy that I thought it must be a false positive. I checked and rechecked everything a few times even though it seemed very obviously malicious. It wasn't a false positive. It was one of the…
Key takeaways A South Asian financial institution was targeted with two custom malware components: a modular backdoor (BRUSHWORM) and a keylogger (BRUSHLOGGER) BRUSHWORM features anti-analysis checks, AES-CBC encrypted configuration, scheduled task persistence, modular DLL payload downloading, USB worm propagation, and broad file theft targeting documents, spreadsheets, email archives, and source code The keylogger masquerades as libcurl via DLL side-loading, capturing system-wide keystrokes…
Introduction During a recent investigation, we came across a data dump containing source code, compiled binaries, and deployment scripts for the kernel rootkit components of VoidLink, a cloud-native Linux malware framework first documented by Check Point Research in January 2026. Check Point's analysis revealed VoidLink to be a sophisticated, modular command-and-control framework written in Zig, featuring cloud-environment detection, a plugin ecosystem of over 30 modules, and multiple rootkit…
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 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,…
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…
GreyNoise intelligence is now available across the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, bringing internet-wide scanning context to SIEM queries, SOAR workflows, and AI-driven triage.