We’re excited to share new updates and enhancements for December, including: For more information on these updates and others, please read the complete list below and follow the links for more detailed articles.

As 2024 comes to a close, today, I’m reflecting on some of the key events and trends that shaped my offensive security research this year. From publishing my first book to writing regular blogs on some of cybersecurity’s hottest topics, each piece has contributed to a clearer understanding of the evolving digital landscape.

Digital forensics, which is sometimes called the "science of the digital age," is very important for finding digital proof and solving cybercrimes. Because of how connected everything is these days and how almost everything leaves a digital trail, digital forensics gives us the methods and tools to find, collect, study, and keep data for future investigations.

A newly discovered critical vulnerability, CVE-2024-53677, in Apache Struts enables remote code execution (RCE) and is actively exploited in the wild using a publicly available Proof-of-Concept (PoC). Apache Struts is an open-source framework for building Java-based web applications. It helps developers create scalable software solutions, that powers everything from e-commerce websites to financial systems and government platforms.

From external collaboration and compliance to key financial info and intellectual property, here are five areas that need Zero Trust as a priority. In mid 2024, Gartner research found that 63% of global organizations had fully or partially-implemented a Zero Trust strategy, but these strategies only covered a small portion of the organization’s environment and that many enterprises were still “not sure what the top practices are for Zero Trust implementations.”

Each year, we revisit our risk rating system to ensure it best reflects the needs of security practitioners safeguarding their organizations and supply chains. For our recentupdate, we’ve made two closely related changes: we’ve recategorized some of our existing findings to make an organization’s risk profile more understandable and recalibrated our scoring algorithm to more clearly illustrate the impact of specific risks.

In this digital age, where cyber threats are always evolving, keeping private data safe has become important for both people and businesses. Encrypting passwords is an important part of data security because it keeps user information hidden from attackers who shouldn't have access to them. Advanced algorithms are used to encrypt passwords into unreadable form. This makes encryption a strong defense against breaches and identity theft.