As 2024 draws to a close, the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve, marked by both familiar adversaries and emerging threats with newer technologies and improved tactics. Rather than merely cataloguing breaches, we look into the anatomy of significant cyber attacks, associated vulnerabilities that led to such events, and relevant controls. We’ve chronicled key developments month by month, offering a comprehensive view of the cyber attacks of 2024 narrative that would help you learn lessons.

Let’s catch up on the more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news gathered from articles across the web this week. This is what we have been reading about on our coffee break! Stand-by for a whole lot more spam and phishing emails. It never ends does it?

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, their infrastructure increasingly spans cloud environments, third-party integrations, and remote work setups. This shift enhances efficiency and productivity—but also broadens the digital attack surface, creating new points of exposure to the public internet.

As developers increasingly adopt chain-based and agentic LLM application architectures, the threat of critical sensitive data exposures grows. LLMs are often highly privileged within their applications and related infrastructure, with access to critical data and resources, making them an alluring target for exploitation at the client side by attackers. In particular, LLM applications can be compromised to expose sensitive data via prompt injection attacks.

Read also: A suspect linked to a $235M WazirX crypto heist arrested, Snowflake hackers indicted in the US, and more.

Hacktivism – the practice of carrying out cyberattacks to advance political or social goals – is not new. Hacktivist attacks go as far back as the 1980s. Yet today’s hacktivists often look and operate in ways that are markedly different from their predecessors. They’ve embraced new techniques, they often have more resources at their disposal and they can prove more challenging to stop.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released version 2.0 of its Cyber security Framework (CSF), significantly elevating cyber security guidelines. This update brings in major changes that will affect several actors like Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), and individual users, among others.

Go developers might need to use system commands for various scenarios, such as image manipulation, where they need to process or resize images or execute system commands to manage resources or gather metrics or logs. At other times, perhaps you are building a new system in Go that needs to interface with existing legacy systems. This interface leans on executing system commands and processing their output.

Data-handling platforms such as Azure DevOps are often relied on by many different modern organizations, therefore it is important to secure such environments. These widely used platforms simplify DevOps processes like project management and the work of developers. However, there is a downside, the rise of technology brings an increased risk of cyber attacks.

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) emerged to address gaps in traditional application and cloud security scanners – like SAST, SCA, secrets detection, IaC scanning, CSPM, and many others – that generate noisy alerts and silo security insights across various tools. By providing a consolidated view of product security risks that are prioritized according to their business and runtime context, ASPM helps security teams understand which issues truly matter.