2024 was a year where automated adversaries and defensive blind spots did most of the heavy lifting for breach campaigns. Picus Security’s two flagship annual outputs for the year, the Blue Report 2024 and the Red Report 2024, make a single practical point clear: attackers are finding reliable ways past prevention, and they are deliberately trying to break the tools defenders rely on.

The core exposure picture from Picus is blunt. Their Blue Report 2024 analyzed more than 136 million simulated attacks and concluded that roughly 40% of tested environments contained attack paths that could lead to domain admin takeover. At the same time, only about 56% of simulated attacks were logged and just 12% triggered alerts, meaning detection was the real bottleneck, not just prevention. macOS endpoints were called out specifically, preventing only about 23% of the simulated attacks versus over 60% for Windows and Linux in Picus’s data. Those numbers help explain why relatively simple intrusions can turn into large breaches when lateral movement and privilege escalation go unchecked.

On the malware side, Picus’s Red Report 2024 documented a notable shift in attacker tactics. Their analysis of hundreds of thousands of malware samples found a surge in so-called “hunter-killer” malware—families and tooling that actively seek out and neutralize defensive controls. Picus reported a roughly 333% increase in malware designed to disable security controls, along with big upticks in evasion techniques such as obfuscated files and application-layer exfiltration methods. The consequence is straightforward: attackers are no longer just trying to evade detection. They are trying to remove detection entirely.

Put together, these findings are the technical anatomy behind many 2024 major breach stories. When endpoints do not reliably block common attack chains, logging and alerting are incomplete, and malware is designed to kill EDR and other controls, the path from initial compromise to full takeover gets dramatically shorter. Picus’s reports do not just catalog failure modes; they quantify them in ways that let security teams prioritize mitigations.

Practical takeaways for teams today

1) Validate, do not assume. Continuous adversarial exposure validation — automated, repeatable simulations that exercise real attack chains — is the highest leverage activity Picus recommends. If your environment still passes on a dashboard but fails a realistic chain that ends in domain admin, you have a false sense of security. Run end-to-end simulations against identity, lateral movement, and data-exfiltration scenarios on a schedule you treat like patching.

2) Harden detection and logging coverage first. Picus found that a majority of simulated attacks were not producing alerts. Improving logging coverage, ensuring telemetry integrity, and treating detection rule quality as a production engineering problem are immediate wins. Prioritize telemetry that captures process injection, unusual command interpreters, and network application-layer anomalies.

3) Stop the kill chain early with identity controls. With many attack paths leading to domain admin and credential theft remaining a primary enabler, strengthen credential hygiene, enforce least privilege, deploy transient credentials where possible, and monitor service account usage aggressively. If you can stop credential theft and lateral escalation, you blunt the attacker’s most reliable route.

4) Assume defenders will be targeted by malware that tries to neutralize them. The Red Report signals a tactical pivot: attackers will attempt to disable EDRs and other controls. Defenders should plan for that by adding layered detection, hardware-backed protections, kernel integrity checks, and remote attestation where feasible. Treat EDRs as one line of visibility, not the last line of defense.

5) Prioritize macOS and nontraditional endpoint platforms. Picus’s measurements showed significantly lower prevention rates on macOS in the datasets they analyzed. If your enterprise includes macOS fleets, do not assume parity with Windows security posture; invest in macOS-specific controls, logging, and validation.

6) Bake automated penetration testing into CTEM workflows. Picus describes combining BAS, automated pentest, and rule validation in an open platform. Operationalizing these capabilities into your Cyber Threat Exposure Management program converts report findings into targeted fixes and reduces time-to-remediation.

Business signal

Market interest followed the risk profile. Picus closed a growth investment round in 2024 that reinforced industry demand for continuous adversarial validation tools. That injection of capital is a sign that the market is moving from point tools to validation platforms that can continuously stress-test complex stacks. Use that signal to justify pilot budgets for continuous validation if you are still running annual red team exercises only.

One-page remediation checklist you can act on this week

  • Run three focused attack simulations: credential theft to lateral movement, process injection to persistence, and application-layer exfiltration. Measure end-to-end outcomes.
  • Map logging coverage and close gaps for identity, process creation, network flows, and privileged activity. Make missing logs a ticketed SLA.
  • Harden account lifecycles: remove standing admin accounts, enforce short-lived credentials, checkpoint service accounts.
  • Verify EDR resiliency: test for known EDR-disabling techniques in a safe lab and patch tool weaknesses or add compensating controls.
  • Treat macOS as a first-class citizen: deploy endpoint controls and validation for Apple platforms where they exist.

Closing note

Picus’s 2024 reports are not an academic exercise. They are a playbook for why so many incidents escalate and what concrete engineering changes reduce that escalation. If you are responsible for defending an environment in 2025, the practical moves are obvious: validate continuously, raise your detection baseline, lock down identity, and design for resilient visibility. Those steps will turn many of the 2024 failure modes into manageable risk in the year ahead.