Last month, members of the Elastic Security team hosted a threat hunting capture the flag (CTF) event at BSides SATX. We provided the community with an environment to learn and practice threat hunting with our team, and cultivated new relationships with attendees. By sharing information with security practitioners, we can help prepare them to defend their organization’s data from attack through knowledge transfer.

Persistence is effectively the ability of the attacker to maintain access to a compromised host through intermittent network access, system reboots, and (to a certain degree) remediation activities. The ability of an attacker to compromise a system or network and successfully carry out their objectives typically relies on their ability to maintain some sort of persistence on the target system/network.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, many educational institutions have been forced to shift their on-campus classes to online classes. Various EdTech platforms have also launched free classes that have prompted students to try their hands on digital education. With more students turning to online learning than ever, these platforms have emerged as a lucrative target for cybercriminals.

The Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. This framework was created through collaboration between various private-sector and government experts to provide high-level taxonomy of cybersecurity outcomes and a methodology to assess and manage those outcomes.

Because a lot of systems are connected to the web these days (or, at least, communicate/integrate with it at some level), companies are giving more and more attention to web security. Web security usually comes to public attention when certain events reach the news, for example, security leakages, hacker activities, and/or data-stealing over big companies, some of them really large (like Google, LinkedIn, etc.).

Once upon a time the telephone system was a trusted method of connecting people. While we now spend more time on our phones than ever, our relationship to phone calls has changed -- we’re hesitant to answer calls from unknown phone numbers, often because we think the call is a con. But what if the caller ID is spoofed/modified and made to look like a telephone number that you may trust or a number with a local area code and familiar prefix?

Hybrid cloud infrastructures run critical business resources and are subject to some of the strictest network security controls. Irrespective of the industry and resource types, these controls broadly fall into three categories. Workloads (pods) running on Kubernetes are ephemeral in nature, and IP-based controls are no longer effective. The challenge is to enforce the organizational security controls on the workloads and Kubernetes nodes themselves.

Ransomware is a malicious type of software that’s used to extort money from victims. It almost always promises to restore the data it encrypts or the operating system it locks, in exchange for a large sum of money. Networks seem to face threats from all directions, but there are ways to prevent malware attacks. Specialized software can protect your assets. In addition, there are other steps you can take to strengthen your ransomware prevention best practices.

We live in a high-tech society that has made many things possible. Today, small e-commerce businesses can sell to people wearing their pajamas half a world away. No longer does a business need a storefront to be successful. If you have an in-demand product, you can sell from anywhere with much less on-hand inventory and overhead than you would have needed not long ago. E-commerce has turned dreamers into successful entrepreneurs, and there's no looking back.