Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As we wrap up Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM) 2022, the final topic we’ll cover is updating software and patching vulnerabilities. According to the 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) from Verizon one of the top paths threat actors use to infiltrate organizations is exploiting vulnerabilities. And there appears to be no end in sight as the number of unique security vulnerabilities rose almost 10% in 2021, up to 20,142 from 18,351 in 2020.

The Elastic Security Labs team is passionate about securing the world’s data from attack, and strives to raise the bar within the security industry. To this end, Elastic Security Labs has compiled the 2022 Global Threat Report to share trends and tactics adversaries and attack groups use, as observed by our threat research team and broader user community over the past year. Let’s dig into a few of the endpoint related findings.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) Phishing Activity Trends Report reveals that in Q2 of 2022 there were 1,097,811 total phishing attacks. This marks the worst quarter for phishing observed to date, exceeding Q1 of 2022 which was the first time the three-month total exceeded one million.

TIBER-EU is the European framework for threat intelligence-based ethical red-teaming and the first EU-wide guide on how authorities, threat intelligence and red-team providers should collaborate with different organizations to help improve their cyber resilience. Thanks to its threat intelligence offering, Outpost24 is well-positioned to create attack scenarios in line with the TIBER-EU framework.

In our previous Cyber Security Awareness Month (CSAM) blog we talked about the added value we as cybersecurity practitioners can bring to the table by sharing knowledge we take for granted with individuals across the organization that will ultimately help strengthen defenses. The first topic we covered was multi-factor authentication (MFA). CSAM’s next topic is using strong passwords. Here are a few tips we have found useful to share with colleagues, as well as family and friends.

You can’t protect your system if you don’t know where the vulnerabilities lie or what aspects of your security architecture are being targeted by threats. Intelligence is everything in security — it’s how CISO’s make large-scale operational decisions, how IT teams prioritize projects, and how responders restore and remediate a system during and after an incident.

We are excited to announce that Elastic has been honored with the 2022 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award for Threat Intelligence Platform of the Year, recognizing the cutting-edge threat intelligence capabilities of Elastic Security, which enable organizations to better understand current and emerging threats and respond more quickly to adversaries.

Do a quick search for the top cybersecurity breaches thus far in 2022 and you’ll quickly be overwhelmed with reports of cryptocurrency thefts, attacks targeting multinational corporations and critical infrastructure, and nation-state backed attacks spurred by ongoing geopolitical conflict. It’s easy for individuals to let their guard down and think they’re safe because these complex attacks aren’t targeting them specifically.

In my previous blog, I covered the many different types of cyber threat intelligence and why gathering CTI is beneficial to security teams. In this post, I will dig into the cyber threat intelligence lifecycle framework and a model to help correlate and contextualize your findings.