Analysis of how default configurations in AWS AgentCore Harness allow prompt injection to exfiltrate credentials, and key steps to secure your agents. The post A Vault with a Heap-View: The Uncomfortable Space Between AgentCore Harness and Identity appeared first on Unit 42.
Key Takeaways Periodic audits provide a point-in-time assessment, but they cannot demonstrate whether controls remain effective between audit cycles. Qualys platform data shows 10.5 billion configuration findings across customer environments but only 1.6% represent meaningful exposure and under 1% are prioritized, business-critical findings. Verizon’s 2026 DBIR found the median time to resolve weak passwords and misconfigured permissions is about 8 months. Across 1 billion misconfiguration…
AI has already made fundamental changes to the operating environment for cybersecurity. Cyberattackers are testing more paths, adapting their techniques, and moving across digital environments with greater speed and persistence. The weaknesses they exploit remain familiar: excessive permissions, unprotected authentication flows, unpatched systems, exposed execution paths, and gaps between controls. What has changed is how quickly these weaknesses can combine into attack paths that cross…
AI is making credential theft faster and easier to scale, giving attackers more opportunities to abuse valid identities. Specops explains why identity security must go beyond successful authentication by verifying that both the user and the device requesting access can be trusted. [...]
AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, leaving unpatchable operational technology (OT) systems at risk. Hoping for the best is not a viable anti-exploitation strategy. Deploying next-generation firewalls directly upstream allows for virtual patching through deep packet inspection. These systems scan incoming traffic to detect and block exploit attempts before they can impact the vulnerable device.The predictability of legitimate network connections to OT systems can be used to protect…
Executive Summary Microsoft’s September 2026 security updates, KB5124008 and KB5124012, have been linked to USB audio failures on some Windows systems, highlighting the operational risk that can accompany security patching. Qualys TruRisk Eliminate classified both updates as Low Reliability, signaling the need for additional validation before production deployment. Patch Reliability helps IT and security teams focus on deeper testing where needed while allowing high-confidence patches to move…
The tech journalists at 404 Media learned that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors to read and review a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts and responses. “Project Lily” is reportedly a program that asks contractors to score or critique ChatGPT’s answers to improve the chatbot’s quality and behavior. The fact that prompts may sometimes be reviewed by humans should not come as a complete surprise. AI companies also monitor conversations for safety reasons. Anthropic, for example,…
AI is shrinking the time between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation, leaving defenders less time to wait for patches or public exploits. Picus Security explains how exploitability validation, security control testing, and autonomous pentesting can help teams close exposure gaps before attackers arrive. [...]
Australia’s move from the Essential Eight to an outcomes-based cybersecurity model will push organizations from conducting periodic point-in-time, checklist compliance assessments to having continuous evidence of a solid security posture.Key takeawaysThe Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is moving from the Essential Eight cybersecurity framework to a new outcomes-focused Essentials series covering enterprise IT, cloud, operational technology (OT), and potentially agentic AI.The Essential…
If you’re still OK with posting pictures of your kids on social media, take a minute to hear from mother of two Kalie Robins. At the start of September, she did something that hundreds of thousands of parents do every day. She posted a video of her young daughter on Facebook. Under the video of Robins and her daughter singing in a car, Facebook’s Meta AI system displayed a suggested question: “Who is the child passenger?” Robins was shocked that Facebook would ask this question about a minor,…
Local privilege escalation (LPE) is the step that turns a foothold into full control of a host. An attacker who lands as an unprivileged user rarely stops there. They want root, and Linux keeps offering new ways to get it.In this edition of our "Linux Detection Engineering" series, we’ll cover:The default flow that a Linux LPE produces on the host and the general rules that detect it.The recurring LPE patterns behind the most recent LPEs and how each works, along with how each looks through the…
The shift from AI-assisted tooling to agentic, AI-native security operations is no longer theoretical. It is entering production at scale, and 2026 represents the practical inflection point for enterprise SOCs. Agent frameworks are stabilizing, defenses against agent-specific attacks are maturing, and executive stakeholders increasingly demand AI-driven outcomes that are transparent, explainable, and auditable.[1]Nearly two-thirds of organizations are already experimenting with AI agents, yet…
Jason Haddix on why manual pentesting can't keep up, what disappears first, and why human methodology is what makes AI pentesting work Category: Guides & Best Practices
Jason Haddix on why manual pentesting can't keep up, what disappears first, and why human methodology is what makes AI pentesting work Category: Guides & Best Practices
Enterprises face an unmanaged crisis of AI agent and MCP server sprawl, characterized by rapid, decentralized proliferation of autonomous agents, protocol connections operating with excessive privilege, opaque execution paths, and identity blind spots. Absent agent-aware governance, modern enterprises struggle to prevent, detect, or contain multi-hop autonomous exploits, leaving environments vulnerable to lateral movement, shadow collaboration, and unauthorized data exfiltration. More…
In this article Edge AI changes the trust model for AI systemsConstrain model actions through deterministic mediationEstablish trust before releasing sensitive assetsVerify runtime before releasing sensitive assetsVerify artifacts that shape model behaviorNext steps Edge AI moves model execution, model IP, customer data, and system authority into infrastructure the customer owns and operates. That changes who must verify the stack before sensitive assets are released. Edge AI includes AI…
Using autonomous AI agents, an attacker breached an enterprise network in a matter of hours. Understand how to address and defend against agentic attacks. The post An AI-Assisted Cyber Attack: Inside a Unit 42 Investigation appeared first on Unit 42.
You might tell an AI chatbot secrets that you wouldn’t divulge to your closest friends. If you do, though, beware: They could end up as evidence in court. An article in the Washington Post this week highlighted several cases in which people had discussed sensitive information with AI systems like Claude and ChatGPT, only to have their conversations obtained by prosecutors or opposing lawyers. Lawyers can get access to your chatbot conversations from AI services like ChatGPT because they aren’t…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hello, everyone. Long time reader, first time writer here at the Threat Source newsletter! I wanted to start out by introducing myself. My colleague and friend Mick Baccio set the bar pretty high last week, so I was planning to tell you all about myself, including: How I did my first real IR under the influence of The Cuckoo’s Egg while an undergraduate (and failed) My pre-bug bounty flirtation with vulnerability research,…
Selecting a model for your security operations center (SOC) and digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tasks is important, but selecting the best one is more involved than you might think. SOC tasks rely on a combination of model efficacy, analysis time, cost, and consistency of results. Cisco Talos tested 66 model and reasoning combinations across offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI on a log analysis task to see if we could identify a clear winner. Instead, we found a repeatable…
Written by: Alex Tselevich, Michael Maturi Introduction Adversarial misuse of AI has increased the risk of data theft and extortion events, because when proprietary source code is exposed, defenders must scramble to identify and patch vulnerabilities while attackers deploy machine-speed AI tools against them. By structuring the analysis process, enforcing skeptical validation steps, and injecting domain-specific human expertise directly into the pipeline, we’ve achieved a leap in efficacy.…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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.
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…
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,…
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…