Mandy Andress

Mandy Andress is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Elastic.

Career path

Andress has published security analysis on Elastic's own blog since at least July 2020. By December 2022 she was writing as Elastic's CISO on the company's 2022 Global Threat Report, describing threat intelligence resources as critical for teams to evaluate their visibility, capabilities, and expertise in preventing cybersecurity threats. In August 2023 she set out 10 rules for security leadership, arguing that CISOs can make an impact on their organization's cybersecurity resilience by understanding their organization's culture and cultivating collaboration. In October 2023 she offered her perspective on the 2023 Elastic Global Threat Report, and she returned to the report again in October 2024 with recommendations for how CISOs can communicate its findings. Through 2025 and into 2026 she continued publishing as Elastic's CISO, addressing AI-driven threats, npm supply-chain compromises, and workforce burnout in cybersecurity.

Public talks and published work

In a 2025 Elastic video discussion of the 2025 Elastic Global Threat Report, Andress said that the "era of static detection rules is over" and argued that security teams must pivot to behavioral analysis to counter AI-driven attacks. In that same discussion she addressed the rise of browser-based attacks and the context needed to catch what rule-based tools overlook. In a July 2025 Elastic blog post, AI is cybersecurity's biggest threat, she shared views on how AI is helping the cybersecurity world shift from reactive to proactive defense, enhancing threat detection and promoting adaptive security. After the September 2025 discovery of the Shai-Hulud worm, a self-replicating malware infecting npm packages, Andress wrote about the steps Elastic took to monitor and mitigate the supply-chain threat, and followed up in December 2025 with an update on the worm's second wave. Writing for TechTarget, she has covered AI agent governance in June 2025, cybersecurity burnout in November 2025, and frontier AI defense in July 2026.