Cybersecurity news covers a broad range of topics that include the latest events, security breaches, advancements in cybersecurity technologies, and regulatory changes. This field is dynamic, with new threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks emerging daily. Keeping up with these developments is crucial for professionals safeguarding digital assets, as it allows them to respond quickly and implement necessary precautions or patches before an incident occurs.
The 2024 breach landscape reflected an alarming expansion in both scale and tactics. Attackers focused on disrupting critical operations and exfiltrating large amounts of data simultaneously, often in a matter of hours. Whether targeting large banks or mid-sized companies, attackers were relentless in their pursuit of money and data.
Zero-day vulnerabilities were central to many high-profile incidents. Threat actors leveraged these flaws for privilege escalation, lateral movement, and ransomware deployment, leaving defenders with little time to update their defenses.
During the NotPetya attack of 2017, Russian state-sponsored hackers exploited a flaw in the Common Log File System (CLFS) to gain initial access to target systems. They used a variety of malware to gain lateral movement and deploy ransomware, causing significant damage.
Financial institutions are particularly vulnerable to payment interruption, with the consequences of a single incident affecting organizations and economies across the globe. In one such incident, the industrial and commercial bank of China, ICBC, incurred $9 billion in losses after its systems were disabled by the LockBit ransomware. This was traced to a Citrix vulnerability known as Citrix Bleed, which was exploited by the LockBit variants of the malware, including Masslogger, Rhadamanthys Stealer, and Snake Keylogger.