Online travel agencies, more commonly referred to as OTAs, are online booking platforms used to compare prices and book flights, hotels or holiday packages. Well-known OTAs include Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor. While we have seen a significant increase in the use of OTAs for booking travel arrangements in recent years, we have also seen a similar rise in OTA fraud. Total fraud loss to OTAs was predicted to grow by 19% to $25 billion by the year 2020.

As a (fairly) new member of Splunk’s Threat Research team (STRT), I found a unique opportunity to train machine learning models in a more impactful way. I focus on the application of natural language processing and deep learning to build security analytics. I am surrounded by fellow data scientists, blue teamers, reverse engineers, and former SOC analysts with a shared passion and vision to push the state of the art in cyber defense.

As we’ve shown in a previous blog, search-based detection rules and Elastic’s machine learning-based anomaly detection can be a powerful way to identify rare and unusual activity in cloud API logs. Now, as of Elastic Security 7.13, we’ve introduced a new set of unsupervised machine learning jobs for network data, and accompanying alert rules, several of which look for geographic anomalies.

Organizations will spend $327.5 billion in 2021 for AI systems according to the IDC report, but not all AI and Machine Leaning investments will bring the desired outcomes.

Many businesses are now talking about artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically machine learning, as a way to solve data problems more effectively. In theory, this sounds easy. What could be better than using AI to get a computer to learn how to solve a problem over time, without manual intervention? The reality is very different, however.

First, what is ransomware? Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts files on the victim’s machine and demands a ransom for restoring access to the files. The instructions on how to pay the ransom are put in a ransom note.

Cloud API logs are a significant blind spot for many organizations and often factor into large-scale, publicly announced data breaches. They pose several challenges to security teams: For all of these reasons, cloud API logs are resistant to conventional threat detection and hunting techniques.

According to a seminal Clark School study, a hacker attacks a computer with internet access every 39 seconds. What’s more, almost a third of all Americans have been harmed by a hacker at one point or another, and more than two-thirds of companies have been victims of web-based attacks. A 2020 IBM study showed that the total cost of data breaches worldwide amounted to $3.9 million, which just may sound the death knell for many businesses affected by breaches.

Security is an essential part of any modern IT foundation, whether in smaller shops or at enterprise-scale. It used to be sufficient to implement rules-based software to defend against malicious actors, but those malicious actors are not standing still. Just as every aspect of IT has become more sophisticated, attackers have continued to innovate as well. Building more and more rules-based software to detect security events means you are always one step behind in an unsustainable fight.