Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Immutable backups (IB) are a robust defense mechanism against the consequences of cyberattacks. The latter can be considered an “evolving constant,” while DevOps environments closely link development and operations. IT teams adopt CI/CD pipelines and centralized applications utilizing multi-cloud deployment. And that usually translates into a growing attack surface (check 2024 DevOps Threats Unwrapped).

In most cases, migration from Bitbucket to Azure DevOps is driven by the need for better integration within the Microsoft ecosystem. This is especially true when scalability for larger projects and a unified development environment support modern software development practices. Companies undergo such a migration for strategic reasons.

The current DevOps market is rapidly expanding and it is important for organizations to keep a competitive edge. Today we will look at Agile methodologies and how they can be applied to and utilized in Jira. As you may know, Jira is a popular and comprehensive project management service from Atlassian that offers many tools that actually support Agile practices and development.

Given the reality of today’s cybersecurity, it is of utmost importance to have frameworks and regulations. These help both the customers and the organizations to stay protected against the cyber threats that are around us. On 17th January 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), formally known as Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, came into full effect.

More and more organizations opt for Azure DevOps to store their source code and project data. Azure DevOps has many benefits – from rapid application deployment and problem-solving capabilities to improved collaboration and communication at the workplace. Yet, they sometimes overlook one important issue – the Shared Responsibility Model. This is a framework which outlines the responsibilities of the user and the provider in regards to security.

The year 2024 was full of incidents, hacker attacks, and security flaws that were used in the wild. Were there any incidents related to the Atlassian ecosystem? Outages? Security flaws? We’ve decided to analyze it. In comparison to the previous year, the number of incidents in Jira grew by 44%, and when we compare it to 2022 the percentage is even higher – 63% – in 2022 there were reported 59 incidents, in 2023 – 75, and in 2024 their number grew to 132 incidents.

In 2024 threat actors were trying to abuse GitHub even more severely than before. There were detected thousands of “ghost accounts” spreading malware. Hackers were also trying to succeed in their malware campaigns using not only repositories but also comments. Moreover, multiple organizations that store their source code on GitHub have experienced data leakage and data breaches. Among those companies are The New York Times, Mercedes Benz, Ultralitics, etc.

In 2024 threat actors were trying to abuse GitHub even more severely than before. There were detected thousands of “ghost accounts” spreading malware. Hackers were also trying to succeed in their malware campaigns using not only repositories but also comments. Moreover, multiple organizations that store their source code on GitHub have experienced data leakage and data breaches. Among those companies are The New York Times, Mercedes Benz, Ultralitics, etc.

Let’s move on with our research on the DevOps threat landscape in 2024. Let’s see which security incidents and vulnerabilities GiLab users faced in the previous year. In 2023, GitLab reported 76 incidents on their Status page, this year the number of incidents grew by almost 21% and compiled 96 incidents in total.

The year 2024 is over, so it’s time to sum up what threats were the most dangerous for DevOps and PMs. Outages, degraded service performance, vulnerabilities, cyberattacks, ransomware – all of those were appearing in media headlines all year round. Thus, for the third year in a row, we’ve decided to analyze incidents related to Git hosting services, like Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian. Our first article in a DevOps threat landscape series is dedicated to Azure DevOps.