Preliminary Disclaimer: The title “top secret” can be interpreted in various ways. To clarify, we will not be sharing any confidential information from clients or prospects. Instead, we will highlight a number of exceptional and highly valuable use cases that can also be achieved with Elastic. Since most people are not aware that all this can be done with Elastic, we use the title “top secret.”

introduction

Many companies and organizations use the Elastic (ELK) stack to monitor applications. To do this, a lot of different logs are ingested, such as access logs and application transaction logs.

Detection of Fraud and Malicious Behavior

These logs are not only useful for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) but they are also valuable sources of information for detecting various types of fraud. Here are some examples of fraud that can be identified through careful analysis.

Data Exfiltration

Example: A large number of data download requests within a short period can indicate that someone is attempting to steal sensitive data.

Detection: Monitor for unusually high volumes of data access or download activity from a single user.

Insider Threats

Example: An employee accessing sensitive information outside of regular working hours might be an indication of malicious intent.

Detection: Track access to sensitive data and match it against the user’s usual working hours and access patterns.

Anomalous Behavior

Example: Users accessing parts of the system or information they have never visited before or accessing at unusual times or locations might indicate fraud.

Detection: Implement anomaly detection systems that flag deviations from a user’s normal behavior.Dit waren slechts enkele voorbeelden; er is nog veel meer mogelijk.

These were just a few examples; a lot more is possible.

Conclusion

Organizations can effectively detect and mitigate fraudulent activities using access and application logs with the Elastic (ELK) stack. If you are already an Elastic customer, it is a matter of setting up the right machine learning jobs to detect the anomalies that correspond to deviant behavior. If you are not yet an Elastic customer, it is definitely time to consider the Elastic (ELK) stack since it can serve different use cases with the same data:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application monitoring
• Log analytics
• Security
• Fraud detection
• …

Want to learn more about how to detect fraudulent activities using Elastic? Feel free to contact us.