Reflections on a Tumultuous 2024: How Cybersecurity and DevSecOps Took Center Stage
As we near the end of 2024, one fact is clear: It’s been another bang up year with an unprecedented amount of security incidents. All the usual suspects and some new ones have thrown things around. Resiliency is the name of the game it seems.
Rising geopolitical tensions, increasingly sophisticated threat actors, and an ongoing wave of high-impact breaches forced organizations to rethink their approach to securing software delivery. Once considered an optional “add-on” to the DevOps pipeline, DevSecOps has now emerged as a critical guardrail—one that must be embedded into every step of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
The stakes were high this year. An array of well-publicized data breaches, persistent ransomware campaigns and a handful of crippling outages underscored that software supply chains remain perilously exposed. Organizations discovered the hard way that simply lifting and shifting operations to the cloud or adopting modern development practices was not enough to guarantee security. In this environment, DevSecOps transformed from a buzzword into a board-level priority, with security teams and development teams aligning more closely than ever before.
Major Incidents Set the Tone
Several high-profile breaches in 2024 forced a reckoning. Unlike in past years, when organizations might have been able to contain the damage quietly, these incidents unfolded amid intense media scrutiny and heightened regulatory oversight. Attackers honed their methods, leveraging increasingly sophisticated zero-day vulnerabilities and exploiting the rapid adoption of cloud-native architectures. In some cases, adversaries turned to generative AI tools to craft more convincing phishing campaigns or to identify hidden misconfigurations within complex infrastructure.
A few notable incidents set the tone:
- Multi-Cloud Misconfigurations: Several Fortune 500 firms reported breaches attributed to misconfigured Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates. These errors allowed attackers to gain persistent footholds, exfiltrate sensitive data and compromise APIs. The resulting brand damage and financial losses reminded everyone that automated provisioning can be a double-edged sword if not properly governed by security policies.
- Supply Chain Attacks Go Mainstream: Sophisticated cybercriminals focused on poisoning software dependencies, CI/CD toolchains and container registries. The industry learned that a single corrupted library or unauthorized credential could ripple through multiple organizations. This spurred increased interest in software bill of materials (SBOMs) and the standardization of secure artifact registries.
- Targeting AI Models and Data Pipelines: As enterprises embraced generative AI to supercharge their development processes, attackers began targeting the very models and pipelines powering these capabilities. Model poisoning, prompt injection attacks and data tampering emerged as new threat vectors, proving that even advanced AI-driven functionalities require robust security checks and continuous validation.
DevSecOps: Security at the Speed of DevOps
In response to these challenges, DevSecOps practices advanced significantly throughout 2024. It became evident that legacy approaches—separate security gating, manual code reviews and after-the-fact penetration testing—could not keep pace with modern deployment cycles. Instead, organizations focused on embedding security controls, policies and checks at every stage of the SDLC.
Among the notable shifts:
- Policy-as-Code and Compliance-as-Code: Organizations embraced the codification of security standards and compliance requirements. Rather than relying on static documents and manual audits, policies became machine-readable rules enforced automatically in pipelines. Developers received near-instant feedback on whether their code, configurations or infrastructure definitions met security and compliance requirements. When combined with AI-powered vulnerability scanning, this approach reduced false positives and helped development teams take corrective action before risky changes reached production.
- Continuous Security Testing and Enhanced Tooling: Security testing tools grew more intelligent, often leveraging machine learning models to detect anomalies or previously unknown vulnerabilities. This year saw wider adoption of dynamic application security testing (DAST), interactive application security testing (IAST) and runtime application self-protection (RASP). Integrated directly into CI/CD workflows, these tools flagged issues early and continuously, helping teams address vulnerabilities while they were still cheap and easy to fix.
- Secure-by-Design Architectures: As platform engineering emerged to streamline the developer experience, it also provided an opportunity to enforce secure-by-default configurations. Internal developer platforms (IDPs) packaged known-good infrastructure blueprints, approved third-party libraries, and built-in security controls. The result was a catalog of secure “golden paths” that developers could follow with confidence, rather than reinventing the wheel—and potentially introducing security flaws—in every project.
From the Trenches: Cultural and Organizational Shifts
Embedding security more deeply into the DevOps ecosystem was not solely a technology story—it was a cultural one. The crisis-level urgency created by recurring breaches forced organizations to break down silos. Security professionals, once gatekeepers standing apart from development teams, moved “inside the huddle,” attending daily stand-ups, participating in code reviews and working directly with platform engineers to refine guardrails.
This shift represented a fundamental mindset change. Instead of treating security as a step at the end of the SDLC, teams adopted the principle that “every developer is also a security engineer.” Mandatory security training, gamified secure coding exercises, and internal communities of practice helped developers and operators internalize the responsibility of safeguarding their products.
At the same time, governance structures evolved. Many companies introduced cross-functional steering committees and task forces responsible for ensuring end-to-end security. These groups coordinated responses to new vulnerabilities, analyzed root causes of security incidents, and tracked metrics that measured not just velocity, but also improvements in the security posture.
Influence of Global Forces and Regulatory Landscape
The global economic and geopolitical backdrop in 2024 added complexity to the cybersecurity narrative. As supply chain dependencies stretched across borders, regulatory demands became more stringent. New data protection laws, industry-specific security standards, and cross-border compliance frameworks emerged rapidly, making automated policy enforcement and comprehensive visibility into the software pipeline even more critical.
Insurers, too, played a significant role. Underwriters began scrutinizing organizations’ DevSecOps maturity when granting cybersecurity insurance coverage. Enterprises with robust security testing regimes, AI-based anomaly detection and proven secure coding practices found it easier—and cheaper—to secure comprehensive coverage. In contrast, those lagging behind faced higher premiums or even denial of coverage.
AI: Both Ally and Threat
Generative AI simultaneously solved and created problems in 2024’s security landscape. On one hand, AI-powered assistants and chatbots helped developers quickly identify vulnerable code patterns, generate secure configuration templates, and automate tedious compliance checks. On the other hand, malicious actors leveraged similar AI-driven capabilities to craft more potent attacks and obfuscate their methods.
Responding to these dual-use threats required a more nuanced approach. Organizations placed a premium on explainable AI (XAI) systems that could justify their decisions, making it easier for security teams to trust and verify AI-driven recommendations. Secure model development lifecycles, incorporating secure training data management and robust validation steps, emerged as a best practice. By year’s end, some forward-thinking enterprises had established “AISecOps” teams dedicated to ensuring that AI systems remained secure, trustworthy and compliant.
Have We Shifted Too Far Left?
DevSecOps had become synonymous with shift left. But one lesson learned this year is that we cannot just throw things at the developers and expect them to do it. We can’t expect developers to be security pros. We also can’t ask them to build the platforms they work on. This has given rise to Platform Engineering and Security working together to give not just developers, but everyone a more stable, secure platform to work on.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As we transition into 2025, cybersecurity and DevSecOps will remain closely intertwined. Expect to see:
- Strengthened DevSecOps Supply Chain Controls: With software supply chain attacks continuing to rise, the integration of SBOMs, automated dependency checks, and secure artifact registries will become mandatory. AI-based systems will increasingly help map dependencies and detect unusual library behaviors before they cause harm.
- Deeper Integration of Security into Platform Engineering: Internal platforms will mature, providing default secure paths for developers. More stringent guardrails, zero-trust network topologies and built-in identity management will make it harder for bad actors to move laterally through environments.
- AI Security at Scale: As model-driven development proliferates, specialized AI security frameworks and monitoring tools will gain traction. These solutions will work hand-in-hand with DevSecOps pipelines, ensuring not only code quality but also the safety and integrity of AI models and their underlying data.
- Global Compliance Automation: With complex, overlapping regulations, compliance automation will continue to mature. We’ll see standardized libraries of reusable policy controls that can be slotted into pipelines, letting organizations adapt quickly to shifting regulatory landscapes.
Conclusion
In 2024, cybersecurity headlines were impossible to ignore. Major breaches, outages and persistent threat campaigns forced every organization—no matter its size, industry or geography—to reconsider its approach to software security. The response, in many cases, was a deeper embrace of DevSecOps principles and tooling, culminating in a more integrated, continuous and proactive security posture.
Looking ahead, one thing is certain: The complexity and velocity of modern development won’t slow down, and cybercriminals will not rest. As we move into 2025, the organizations that will fare best are those that recognize security as not just a box to be checked, but as an intrinsic element of how software is conceived, built, deployed and maintained. In an era when every line of code can be an asset or a liability, DevSecOps stands as a beacon, guiding us toward a safer and more resilient digital future. Or so I like to think 😊
PS – Quick plug, be sure to attend our 10th annual DevSecOps event at RSA Conference this year. The theme is Cybersecurity and AI effects on AppDev. Check out https://techstrongevents.com for details.
Also, for a full outlook on what we think 2025 holds, be sure to join us for Predict 2025, our virtual event. Register Here.
