cyber trends and priorities of controls/defences.

Are there any useful documents/articles that are routinely issued/upgraded which show specific trends in cyber attacks for say the past 2-3 years, and for any major cyber attacks that hit the news – what the root cause of the vulnerability that was exploited was? i.e. what the cyber criminals are targeting nowadays, and what the relevant controls are to protect against those, assuming they could be protected against, e.g. a relevant patch applied?

I was also interested in identifying the primary/priority security defences, or at least coming up with some form of priority checklist of what to assess in what order when it comes to security. I appreciate on larger networks/infrastructure security must be an absolutely mammoth effort, and any single vulnerability on any device could be your downfall, but there must be some form of precedence in terms of priority of cyber controls when self-assessing your cyber/security defences, so my question to you is - where exactly would you start, and do any of the guidelines out there put cyber controls/defences in order of importance/priority, I assume they must do, but quite which articles/guidelines is an unknown to me.  

If you were doing an independent review of your security/cyber defences, what order would you start in, e.g. the absolutely bare minimums, and then onto the second tier of
defences, 3rd etc. If there are no such guidelines, your own view on this would be equally as interesting.