Expert Insights Cybersecurity Industry News Recap: December 12 – 19, 2024

Last updated on Jun 6, 2025 1 Minute To Read
Joel Witts Written by Joel Witts
Laura Iannini Technical Review by Laura Iannini
Expert Insights Cybersecurity Industry News Recap: December 12 – 19, 2024

🚨 Vendor News & Announcements

  • Artic Wolf announced on Monday that it plans to acquire endpoint security tool Cylance from BlackBerry, in an acquisition valued at $160 million USD. BlackBerry paid $1.4 billion USD to acquire Cylance in 2018. (CRN)

  • Crowdstrike is the first and fastest pure play SaaS cybersecurity vendor to surpass $1 billion USD in sales with SHI International, a leading global technology provider, driven by its AI-powered Falcon XDR platform. (Crowdstrike)

  • Cisco intends to acquire SnapAttack, a detection and defense company, with the aim of integrating the platform into Splunk’s broader SIEM platform. SnapAttack was founded in 2021. (Splunk Blogs)

  • Alphabet spin-off SandboxAQ has raised $300 million USD in funding with a valuation of $5.3 billion USD. The company develops large quantitative models (LQMs) and other AI apps for cybersecurity, medical, materials, and chemistry. (Securityweek)

📟 Product Releases & Patches

  • BeyondTrust has deployed an urgent patch for a vulnerability in its Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) products that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to inject commands that are tun as a site user. (Beyond Trust)

  • Google has released a Chrome 131 update that patches five high-severity memory safety vulnerabilities, including four high-severity memory safety bugs. Google paid out $55,000 USD to the threat researcher who reported it. (SecurityWeek)

🎣 Threats, Bugs & Hacks

  • Vulnerabilities found in Apache Struts, an open-source web application framework, are actively being exploited by threat actors. The vulnerabilities impact Struts versions 2.0.0 through 2.3.37 and 2.5.0 through 2.5.33, which have been discontinued, and version 6.0.0 through 6.3.0.2. Struts version 6.4.0 fixes the vulnerability. (SecurityWeek)

  • ESET’s threat research team has discovered a new investment scam that combines social media malvertising, company-branded posts and AI deepfakes of celebrities, aiming to harvest personal information and credentials. (TheHackerNews)

  • Hacking group IntelBroker has reportedly stolen 2.9GB of data from Cisco’s DevHub environment, including source code from GitHub projects, and confidential Cisco documents. (Cyber Press)

  • Palo Alto Networks threat researchers have uncovered a new phishing campaign leveraging HubSpot tools to mimic DocuSign. The scam targeted European companies with the aim of stealing credentials for Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. (The Hacker News)

🏛 Policies, Legislation & Fines

  • Meta has been fined €251 Million by the Irish Data Protection Commission following a personal data breach, which were originally reported by Meta in Ireland in September 2018. The breach affected 29 million Facebook accounts globally. (Data Protection Ireland)

  • CISA has issued an operational directive (BOD 25-01) ordering federal civilian agencies to secure cloud environments, with required secure configuration baselines for Microsoft 365. Further baselines for other cloud platforms, including Google Workspace. (BleepingComputer)

🎙️ Expert Insights: Interviews

Don’t miss this week’s round of interviews with cybersecurity experts and thought leaders.

💡 That’s all from us for 2024. Happy holidays from the Expert Insights Team!

Written By Written By
Joel Witts
Joel Witts Content Director

Joel is the Director of Content and a co-founder at Expert Insights; a rapidly growing media company focussed on covering cybersecurity solutions.

He’s an experienced journalist and editor with 8 years’ experience covering the cybersecurity space. He’s reviewed hundreds of cybersecurity solutions, interviewed hundreds of industry experts and produced dozens of industry reports read by thousands of CISOs and security professionals in topics like IAM, MFA, zero trust, email security, DevSecOps and more.

He also hosts the Expert Insights Podcast and co-writes the weekly newsletter, Decrypted. Joel is driven to share his team’s expertise with cybersecurity leaders to help them create more secure business foundations.

Technical Review Technical Review
Laura Iannini
Laura Iannini Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is a Cybersecurity Analyst at Expert Insights. With deep cybersecurity knowledge and strong research skills, she leads Expert Insights’ product testing team, conducting thorough tests of product features and in-depth industry analysis to ensure that Expert Insights’ product reviews are definitive and insightful.

Laura also carries out wider analysis of vendor landscapes and industry trends to inform Expert Insights’ enterprise cybersecurity buyers’ guides, covering topics such as security awareness training, cloud backup and recovery, email security, and network monitoring. Prior to working at Expert Insights, Laura worked as a Senior Information Security Engineer at Constant Edge, where she tested cybersecurity solutions, carried out product demos, and provided high-quality ongoing technical support.

Laura holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida.