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

Welcome to your weekly recap of the cybersecurity industry news, M&As, releases and hacks making headlines this week.

🥂 It’s our final news roundup of 2024 – thanks for reading. We’ll look forward to seeing you next year where we’ll be back with a bumper edition.

• Have any feedback or stories to share? Get in touch with [email protected].

🚨 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.

• Alex Simons, Corporate Vice President, IAM, Microsoft: Evolving Identity-Based Threats And The Future Of IAM
• Roger Grimes, Data Defense Evangelist at KnowBe4: Evolving Phishing Threats & Building A Robust Security Culture

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

Expert Insights’ Cybersecurity Resources

• The Top RMM Solutions For MSPs
• The Top Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solutions
• The Top Email Security Solutions For Office 365
• The Top Email Security Gateways
• The Top Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Solutions For Business
• The Top Phishing Protection Solutions
• The Top Cyber Threat Intelligence Solutions