Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Though 2024 may be behind us, many of the security threats and vulnerabilities that organizations faced last year remain. The CrowdStrike Professional Services Red Team tracks them all in its efforts to defend organizations against adversaries. The three most common exploitation paths we encountered were: In this blog, we break down these three critical exploitation paths, detailing how they occur and what steps organizations can take to mitigate them.

The rise of connected devices has fundamentally reshaped industries, enabling unprecedented levels of automation, efficiency, and innovation. These devices fall under the Extended Internet of Things (XIoT), a broad category encompassing traditional Internet of Things (IoT) devices, operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and other connected assets that span enterprise IT and operational environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries, but with this innovation come new security challenges as threat actors explore AI’s powerful capabilities. They’re adopting new techniques, targeting AI models, injecting malicious code into AI processes, and exploiting vulnerabilities in AI-related software packages.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has transformed its approach to validating its level of cybersecurity maturity across healthcare by adopting the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF). This shift is key to achieving the NHS’s broader goals: protecting patient data, ensuring uninterrupted healthcare delivery, and building the foundation for a fully digitized healthcare system by 2030.

SOC teams across businesses, industries, and geographies share the same goal: Stop cyberattacks before damage is done. But for those with legacy SIEMs, this is nearly impossible to achieve. Legacy SIEMs demand an overwhelming investment of time, resources, and expertise to set up and maintain.

CrowdStrike Incident Response (IR) services sees firsthand why organizations facing today’s evolving threat landscape require advanced capabilities to detect, respond, and remediate cyberattacks in near real time. These observations continue to shape our approach to delivering unparalleled incident response.

Adversaries don’t need to force their way in when they can slip through an organization’s overlooked assets. Subdomain takeovers are a prime example of how attackers exploit misconfigured or abandoned DNS records to gain access, launch phishing campaigns, distribute malware, or take other malicious actions — all while operating under the guise of a legitimate corporate domain.

The CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report highlights the ongoing threat of identity-based attacks. Adversaries are increasingly exploiting stolen credentials to evade detection, and 79% of detections overall were classified as malware-free. Valid account abuse became the primary initial access method in 35% of cloud intrusions. The report also shares that access broker advertisements rose by 50% year-over-year, indicating a rise in demand for valid credentials and other forms of access.

In recent years, Transformer models have been the backbone of the revolution within the artificial intelligence sector. They are the basis of large language models (LLMs) and responsible for LLMs’ ability to understand and generate text of a human-like quality. Transformers are able to learn long-range interactions between words and sentences, allowing them to retain high-level concepts and insights into their training data.

Since CrowdStrike’s acquisition of Bionic, we have been embedding application security posture management (ASPM) capabilities into CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, creating a unified solution that bridges the gap between proactive security for cloud security teams and cloud runtime protection for security operations. We are excited to share new ASPM updates in Falcon Cloud Security, built to help teams detect and respond faster to today’s cloud-focused adversaries.