Many countries around the world recognized Data Protection Day in January — a day that highlights the importance of protecting individual privacy and data against misuse. The U.S. celebrated Data Privacy Day, where privacy and security have often been seen as two separate issues. This is evidenced by the way law has historically developed.

On Feb. 23, 2022, a new wiper malware was reported publicly as affecting Ukrainian-based systems. Following a series of denial-of-service attacks and website defacements, the new destructive malware corrupts the master boot record (MBR), partition and file system of all available physical drives on Windows machines. CrowdStrike Intelligence refers to this new destructive malware as DriveSlayer, and it’s the second wiper to affect Ukraine following the recent WhisperGate.

The job for CIOs, CISOs and their security and IT teams may be more complex than ever in 2022. Ongoing support for hybrid workforces, coupled with the continued shift to the cloud, has expanded the threat surface. At the same time, the infrastructure and environments supporting organizations are growing ever more vulnerable. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), more than 18,000 vulnerabilities were reported in 2021.

Migrating to the cloud has allowed many organizations to reduce costs, innovate faster and deliver business results more effectively. However, as businesses expand their cloud investments, they must adapt their security strategies to stay one step ahead of threats that target their expanded environment. Managing, securing and having visibility across endpoints, networks and workloads is not an easy feat. It requires a unified defense-in-depth approach.

Access brokers have become a key component of the eCrime threat landscape, selling access to threat actors and facilitating myriad criminal activities. Many have established relationships with big game hunting (BGH) ransomware operators and affiliates of prolific ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) programs.

Adversaries are becoming more adept and sophisticated in their attacks. Taking advantage of vulnerabilities present in major software is often an attractive entry point for establishing a campaign within an enterprise environment. The CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report highlights how adversaries continue to shift tradecraft and weaponize vulnerabilities to evade detection and gain access to critical applications and infrastructure.

As technology continues to evolve rapidly, so do the techniques used by adversaries. This may be considered a given, but it is important to appreciate how attackers may leverage existing and commonly used applications within an environment to attempt to seize control and achieve their objectives.

Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions deliver powerful capabilities to help security teams fight adversaries by increasing visibility, simplifying operations and accelerating identification and remediation across the security stack. XDR platforms gather and aggregate security data from a variety of sources to help detect and contain advanced attacks. But when it comes to efficiently analyzing threat data and quickly identifying the root cause of an incident, not all XDR solutions are alike.

CrowdStrike continues to support coverage of MITRE, first through the MITRE ATT&CK® framework and now with the latest findings from the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense (CTID). Today MITRE CTID released a report examining threat trends and patterns frequently used by malicious insiders to exfiltrate data, access confidential information and commit fraud.

Adversaries are moving beyond malware and becoming more sophisticated in their attacks by using legitimate credentials and built-in tools to evade detection by traditional antivirus products. According to the CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report, 62% of detections indexed by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud in Q4 2021 were malware-free.

For security teams on the front lines and those of us in the business of stopping cyberattacks and breaches, 2021 provided no rest for the weary. In the face of massive disruption brought about by the COVID-driven social, economic and technological shifts of 2020, adversaries refined their tradecraft to become even more sophisticated and brazen. The result was a series of high-profile attacks that rocked many organizations and, on their own, represented watershed moments in cybersecurity.

Since we founded CrowdStrike, one of the things I’m proudest of is our collective ability to work with customers to lead the industry forward. Leadership is more than just being the loudest voice or making wild marketing claims. It’s about listening and working with customers to help them solve their hardest problems to achieve a common goal: stopping breaches.

This week we announced the general availability of CrowdStrike’s newest innovation, Falcon XDR, and I couldn’t be more excited. Using our same single, lightweight agent architecture, Falcon XDR enables security teams to bring in third-party data sources for a fully unified solution to rapidly and efficiently hunt and eliminate threats across multiple security domains.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of CrowdStrike’s newest innovation: Falcon XDR. Founded on our pioneering endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology and the power of the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, Falcon XDR delivers the next generation of unified, full-spectrum extended detection and response (XDR) so security teams can stop breaches faster.

Protecting cloud workloads from zero-day vulnerabilities like Log4Shell is a challenge that every organization faces. When a vulnerability is published, organizations can try to identify impacted artifacts through software composition analysis, but even if they’re able to identify all impacted areas, the patching process can be cumbersome and time-consuming. As we saw with Log4Shell, this can become even more complicated when the vulnerability is nearly ubiquitous.

In November 2021, a vulnerability was discovered in a ubiquitous Linux module named Polkit. Developed by Red Hat, Polkit facilitates the communication between privileged and unprivileged processes on Linux endpoints. Due to a flaw in a component of Polkit — pkexec — a local privilege escalation vulnerability exists that, when exploited, will allow a standard user to elevate to root.