The calculus of cybersecurity has changed. AI is reshaping how organizations build, deploy, operate, and defend digital systems. AI-powered development tools, agents, and autonomous workflows are accelerating innovation but they are also introducing new attack surfaces, new trust boundaries, and new security challenges. Microsoft has long helped organizations secure their digital estates using Zero Trust principles. That leadership was recently recognized by KuppingerCole analysts, which named…
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…
Executive Summary In the Frontier AI era, the number of CISA-known exploited vulnerabilities has increased by 6.5x over the past four years, and time-to-exploitation has collapsed to -7 days. Traditional monthly patch cycles cannot keep up. Organizations need a new operating model that detects at AI speed, hyper-prioritizes truly exploitable exposures, and remediates immediately. TruRisk Eliminate delivers operational resiliency through the AI-Powered Patch Reliability Score, patchless…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 27th July, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Minnesota IT Services has confirmed coordinated cyberattacks affecting more than 30 community water utilities across the state. The incidents briefly disrupted a treatment plant in Braham and affected industrial control systems. Officials reported that drinking water safety was not affected. While the attack was not officially attributed, federal…
Executive Summary Frontier AI has turned CVE weaponization timelines to hours, making scan-bound detection a growing compliance and breach-risk challenge. Agent Insta powers InstaScan to deliver scanless detection by transforming existing inventory, telemetry, and threat intelligence into validated exposure findings within minutes of disclosure. Operating 24/7, InstaScan enables AI-speed detection with 90%+ coverage across technologies representing 60–70% of enterprise vulnerability volume.…
Tenable spent 30 days running frontier AI models against our own code. It didn’t just find bugs — it proved they’re real, with reproducible exploits. That fundamentally changes code security from ranking potential code defects to a much higher signal focused on the findings that matter. Read on to learn how it reshaped our security team's work, what it cost, and why your program is next.Key takeaways:Now code security starts with proof, not suspicions. Frontier AI instantly builds working…
Black Hat USA returns to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas this August, bringing together security practitioners, researchers, and leaders from around the world. Rapid7 will be there in the Business Hall, with new capabilities, live demonstrations, expert-led sessions, and two days of activities at the Border Grill.This year, our focus is preemptive security: helping security teams anticipate credible risk, respond at machine speed, and maintain an accurate view of their security and compliance posture…
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…
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.…
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…
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.…
Every organization needs security that protects end to end with the speed and scale of AI. Microsoft’s vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations scale AI and expand across environments, security teams need protection that covers every surface. This month’s updates help security and IT teams secure their AI environments, use AI to defend at speed and scale, and strengthen the foundations that AI-powered operations depend on.…
IDC has named Rapid7 a Leader in the 2026 Worldwide Managed Detection and Response Service for Midmarket 2026 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US52992326, July 2026). We believe this recognition and research highlights where MDR is heading.Many security programs are still built around a reactive sequence of detect, triage, and respond, but the timelines surrounding modern attacks have changed too quickly for that model to hold up on its own. Time-to-exploit has dropped from two years to 22 hours, while…
CEO Kyle Hanslovan outlines how Huntress is evolving its research-led strategy, adopting AI with human oversight, and expanding its partner network to protect businesses against rapid, automated cyberattacks.
TrendAI joins Nvidia as an inaugural partner in the Open Secure AI Alliance, advancing open models, harnesses, and research to strengthen cyber defense.
Check out GreyNoise's new Head of Adversary Engagement, Mark Mager, on why traditional detection engineering can't keep pace with CVE growth — and the agentic pipeline replacing it.
As organizations move beyond AI experimentation, success will depend on how effectively they combine intelligence and trust. The same systems that amplify knowledge, accelerate decisions, and unlock new outcomes must also protect data, govern AI, and build resilience. In this next phase of transformation, security is not separate from innovation—it is an enabler that helps make responsible innovation possible at a faster pace. That starts with asking better questions—the kind that help…
The scenario is all too familiar for any cybersecurity professional: It’s late in the day, and a critical zero-day vulnerability is disclosed. When this happens, CISOs from every industry immediately turn to their Security Operations Centers (SOC) with the single most important, and often most difficult, question: "Are we exposed?”Answering questions like these when zero-days drop tends to trigger a frantic, high-stress fire drill. Analysts scramble to cross-reference outdated Configuration…
Key Takeaways AI adoption has outpaced enterprise controls, with AI and LLM workloads appearing faster than security teams can inventory or approve them. AI governance has become an evidence problem. Policies, questionnaires, and risk registers cannot prove that AI systems are safe. Traditional security tools see only fragments of AI risk. They miss model behavior, cannot produce technical evidence, and do not discover or assess the full AI estate. TotalAI connects four components of AI…
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…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 27th July, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Nichirei, a Japan-based frozen-food supplier and logistics company, has experienced a ransomware attack that disrupted shipping operations and affected approximately 5,000 customers. KFC Japan warned of possible shortages. Nichirei confirmed personal data theft, while the RansomHouse group claimed responsibility and published a subset of the stolen…
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…