Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Staying up-to-date on the current state of security and understanding the implications of today’s growing threat landscape is critical to my role as CISO at Elastic. Part of this includes closely following the latest security threat reports, highlighting trends, and offering valuable insights into methods bad actors use to compromise environments.

When delivering customer experiences from the cloud, defending the app includes the data it houses and the business it represents. The DevSecOps mindset, “You build it, you run it, you secure it” helps, but only when all teams are empowered with the info they need to see a threat, regardless of where it is.

K-12 school districts in the U.S. are struggling with cybersecurity. According to an October 2022 GAO report, ransomware attacks have cost schools up to three weeks of missed learning. The GAO also noted that recovery can take as long as nine months. In January 2021, 3,000 K-12 public schools in the U.S. were victim to a large-scale worldwide cyberattack.

In this post, I want to scratch at the surface of a very interesting technology that Elastic’s Universal Profiler and Security solution both use called eBPF and explain why it is a critically important technology for modern observability. I’ll talk a little bit about how it works and how it can be used to create powerful monitoring solutions — and dream up ways eBPF could be used in the future for observability use cases.

For far too long, the cybersecurity industry has subscribed to a flawed methodology — one that is based on the notion that organizations can avoid security threats through obscurity and secrecy. The assumption is that keeping security controls and processes covert makes products and data inherently more secure against cyber threats within the networks we defend. However, even the most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses are no match for well-funded, highly motivated adversaries.

Security teams need the ability to model their complex organizations by splitting data across multiple tenants while maintaining complete visibility throughout the entire infrastructure. At the same time, they must keep data segregated to maintain security and meet data residency and compliance requirements.

The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) seeks to help secure the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) supply chain by requiring contractors and subcontractors to standardize their security controls. With CMMC 2.0, the Office of the Under Secretary of the Defense Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD(A&S)) designated National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-171 as the foundation of the framework.