Cybersecurity Policy Report, ‘Zero-Day’ Exploits Fell Out of Favor With Hackers in 2024, Cisco Talos Reports, (Mar 31, 2025)
Cyber criminals over the past year relied more on stealth and efficiency than complex malware and “zero-day” exploits, according to an annual threat report published today by Talos, Cisco Systems, Inc.’s cybersecurity division.
But some of the identity-based attacks favored by hackers proved to be difficult to prevent and even harder to detect, allowing bad actors to go unnoticed for longer periods of time, the report notes.
Identity-based attacks—using identifiers such as login credentials, session IDs, application programming interface keys, digital certificates, and more—accounted for 60% of incident response cases received by Cisco Talos, it says.
To gain initial access, ransomware actors overwhelmingly (70%) leveraged valid accounts, targeting education entities more than any other sector in 2024, which is a trend seen in previous years, the report notes.
In multi-factor authentication (MFA) attacks, identity and access management (IAM) applications were targeted most frequently, at nearly one-quarter of related incidents. Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning by threat actors largely fell short of industry projections; instead, actors relied on these technologies to enhance their techniques, rather than to aid in the creation of new methods, Talos reported.
Threats to the systems underpinning organizations’ networks are persistent, requiring organizations to continue prioritizing security fundamentals and addressing aging infrastructure, as some top-targeted network vulnerabilities affect end-of-life devices and have no available patches, underscoring the importance of organizations’ decommissioning and replacing of end-of-life network components, according to the report.
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