The 10 Hottest Cybersecurity Tools And Products Of 2024

Top products from both cybersecurity industry giants and startups — across segments including security operations, data security and AI-powered email protection — made our end-of-year list.

As generative AI became ubiquitous across cybersecurity tools in 2024, it took more than just a mention of GenAI for vendors to distinguish their products in the massively crowded field of AI-powered security offerings. A number of companies — spanning both cybersecurity industry giants and fast-growing startups — were up to the challenge, releasing top products that aim to deliver real improvements on security outcomes with the help of AI/ML.

For solution providers, the focus on gaining real improvements from AI for security in 2024 has been key. At solution and service provider Tevora, for instance, cybersecurity architecture expert Mark Broghammer said that while evaluating potential new products to work with, a major focus right now is on finding “security-forward thinking” paired with smart approaches to AI and automation.

“That’s where I tend to look — how are we gaining operational efficiency? Whether that’s AI/ML, whether that's new technology, whether that’s looking at different data sets — those are the pieces that I’m really looking for,” said Broghammer, vice president of security architecture at Irvine, Calif.-based Tevora. “What are the integrations? How is the data flowing between the two? And how can the tools interact well? Because if you get that right toolset or that right mix, you're reducing your operational complexity.”

Ultimately, while AI as a term is still over-hyped and not always used accurately, some vendors are undoubtedly finding meaningful ways to use the capabilities for improving security, he said. “I think the folks that are actually doing a very good job of AI are scaling it into the cloud and looking at subsets of data — and they have a faster time to deployment. And I think they're gaining more traction that way,” Broghammer said.

For CRN’s end-of-year coverage, we’ve chosen 10 cybersecurity tools and products that have been on our radar in 2024 thanks to their combination of technical capabilities and opportunities for channel partners. To better understand the products, CRN has recently spoken with top executives from each of the companies including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz and SentinelOne.

Our picks include companies offering tools in crucial categories such as security operations, data security and email protection, as well as security for cloud environments and application development.

What follows (in alphabetical order) are 10 of the hottest cybersecurity tools and products of 2024.

Abnormal Security: AI Security Mailbox

Abnormal Security announced what it called an “AI coworker” for protecting email inboxes with the debut of AI Security Mailbox. The tool provides a customized response to employees who report a potential attack about whether the reported email was determined to be malicious, along with details on how the system arrived at its determination. The idea is to enhance email security by generating a “very personalized conversation,” said Abnormal Security Co-founder and CTO Sanjay Jeyakumar. Through the capability, “an AI analyst actually responds, saying, ‘Hey, for this message, here are the things that are telling you that it's a spam message or a graymail message, as opposed to a phishing message,” Jeyakumar told CRN. “So it’s not just about being the automation for phishing [protection], but it becomes this delightful experience.”

Arctic Wolf: Aurora Platform Expansion

Arctic Wolf introduced new capabilities including in the areas of threat intelligence and identity threat detection to its security operations platform, Aurora, in 2024. In June, Arctic Wolf added identity threat detection and response capabilities featuring integrations with Microsoft Defender for Identity as well as with Okta. And in November, the vendor unveiled Arctic Wolf Threat Intelligence, which provides real-time threat intel along with curated reporting. The moves come as “customers are still looking for a vendor or a platform of record” within cybersecurity, Arctic Wolf CEO Nick Schneider told CRN. Customers are seeking a platform to help them “understand their security posture wholesale — regardless of the attack surface that they're talking about, regardless of the threat or the technique that they’re talking about,” Schneider said. “That's our end goal — to drive customers' risk to effectively zero, to end their cyber risk within their environment.”

CrowdStrike: Falcon Next-Gen SIEM

CrowdStrike announced the launch of Falcon Next-Gen SIEM that delivers both better security outcomes and lower costs than rival offerings in the crucial SIEM (security information and event management) market, CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard told CRN. The benefits come partly from not needing to move or store endpoint data—which constitutes a sizable portion of the data utilized by a SIEM system—across separate data lakes, Bernard said. Key capabilities include integrations with numerous third-party technologies as well as incorporation of the company’s Charlotte GenAI assistant, which offers advantages such as correlation of related context around security incidents and generation of summaries of the incidents, the company said. “It's really all the creature comforts that [customers] are used to in their legacy SIEM, but supercharged and taken to a whole new level,” Bernard said.

Cyera: AI-Powered DLP

Data security up-and-comer Cyera offers a data security posture management (DSPM) tool that specializes in rapidly providing visibility into the status of an organization’s data and identity access. The technology offers an agentless approach and works across cloud environments, SaaS, data lakes and on-premises environments. In October, the company acquired data loss prevention startup Trail Security for $162 million, which Cyera Co-Founder and CEO Yotam Segev said has brought a unique AI-powered approach to DLP onto the Cyera platform. “Suddenly, you’re able to actually make DLP work — because you know what you're trying to protect, and because you know what the crown jewels are and where they reside,” Segev said. “And you can build policies to either keep them there or to prevent them from going places where they're not supposed to go, or to monitor how they're moving in the environment. That was the biggest challenge with DLP.”

Illumio: CloudSecure

Illumio made its offering for zero-trust segmentation in public cloud and hybrid cloud environments, CloudSecure, available in January with a brand-new, agentless architecture, Co-founder and CEO Andrew Rubin said. The company took a fresh approach with the architecture as compared to the vendor’s segmentation offerings for data center and endpoints, which utilize agents, and as a result Illumio now can provide segmentation across IT environments with the availability of CloudSecure, Rubin said. “Public cloud is an area where segmentation has not existed in a traditional sense,” he told CRN. Now with CloudSecure, “I think it will be as big and as important as our data center offering that brought the company to market,” Rubin said.

Island: Enterprise Browser DLP Expansion

Island offers a secure workplace-focused web browser built on Chromium, the Island Enterprise Browser, which provides a range of capabilities for protecting data and users automatically embedded within the browser itself. Capabilities include protection against web-based threats, conditional access controls and zero-trust network access to private apps. This year, Island announced an expansion of its data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to include a new module, DLP 360, providing governance of clipboard data and text inputs in app fields, according to Chief Customer Officer Bradon Rogers. While Island’s earlier DLP capabilities had focused on file uploads and downloads, “now we've added the ability to govern the movement of the data in the clipboard and the entry of data into fields of the applications,” Rogers told CRN. DLP 360 also offers Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for document analysis, while Island introduced Microsoft Purview support in 2024, as well, he said.

Palo Alto Networks: Cortex XSIAM for Cloud

In 2024, Palo Alto Networks unveiled new cloud security functionality through its AI-powered security operations platform, Cortex XSIAM (extended security intelligence and automation management). The offering, Cortex XSIAM for Cloud, introduces a new Cloud Command Center that provides comprehensive visibility around cloud assets, according to Gonen Fink, senior vice president of products for Cortex and Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. Meanwhile, the inclusion of a new cloud security agent as part of XSIAM for Cloud enables key capabilities such as cloud detection and response (CDR) — and along with bringing together multiple cloud security tools, XSIAM For Cloud is also delivering cloud security data into one centralized data lake, he said. Ultimately, the new offering enables Palo Alto Networks to deliver what Fink described as the “first” Security Operations Center platform optimized for the cloud.

SentinelOne: Purple AI Enhancements

In May, SentinelOne debuted a major new automated investigation capability on its Singularity Platform, powered by its Purple AI technology. Auto-Investigation is “where Purple is conducting the investigation on your behalf,” Ric Smith, SentinelOne’s chief product and technology officer, told CRN. Today, Security Operations Center teams are “hyper-burdened with alerts,” Smith said. “We're trying to make it such that this [technology] can go through and deal with the investigation on behalf of the analyst. It’s basically burning down that backlog and burning down risk, which has never been done before.” Other key Purple AI capabilities include enhanced anomaly detection, automated triage of alerts and AI-driven response recommendations.

Snyk: AppRisk Pro

Building on the debut last year of Snyk’s application security posture management (ASPM) offering, AppRisk, the developer security platform vendor announced the launch of AppRisk Pro. The “developer-first” ASPM offering includes key capabilities such as being able to trace back insecure portions of apps to specific components in the code that need to be fixed, according to Snyk Chief Innovation Officer Manoj Nair. Other major capabilities include improved prioritization through developer-focused tools for vulnerability remediation and prevention.

Wiz Code

In September, Wiz unveiled its new offering for tracing security risks back to application code. The offering, Wiz Code, correlates vulnerable cloud assets and potential attack paths with the related source code (and its developer), according to Wiz co-founder Yinon Costica. The idea is for Wiz to not only identify security risks but also tell customers, “‘Here is the line of code that you should go and fix,’” he said. The result is that Wiz can now enable customers to “remediate what they find in the cloud directly in the code,” Costica told CRN. “That's very compelling for customers.” Ultimately, this expedited process for addressing cloud- and code-related risks is also a crucial capability at a time when numerous dynamics are underscoring “the need to do more security earlier in the code,” he said.