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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…