When DevOps emerged more than ten years ago, the main focus was to bridge the gaps between dev and ops teams. This was achieved by introducing automation to the processes of designing, building, testing, and deploying applications. But as development teams continue to deliver faster and more frequently, security teams find it difficult to keep up. Often, they become the bottleneck in the delivery pipeline.

If you feel like you can’t go a week without hearing about yet another data breach on the news, you’re not experiencing déjà vu. Data breaches are on the rise, and massive organizations like Solar Winds and Facebook aren’t the only ones vulnerable to attack.

Today (Dec.10, 2021), a new, critical Log4j vulnerability was disclosed: Log4Shell. This vulnerability within the popular Java logging framework was published as CVE-2021-44228, categorized as Critical with a CVSS score of 10 (the highest score possible). The vulnerability was discovered by Chen Zhaojun from Alibaba’s Cloud Security team. All current versions of log4j2 up to 2.14.1 are vulnerable. You can remediate this vulnerability by updating to version 2.15.0 or later.

Security researchers recently disclosed the vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in Apache’s log4j, which is a common Java-based library used for logging purposes. Popular projects, such as Struts2, Kafka, and Solr make use of log4j. The vulnerability was announced on Twitter, with a link to a github commit which shows the issue being fixed. Proof-of-concept code was also released to github which shows that the vulnerability is trivial to exploit.

Financial institutions are a rich target for cybercriminals, who scoop up sensitive personal information that allows them to open fake accounts and fraudulent lines of credit. According to research from services firm Accenture and the Ponemon Institute, the average annualized cost of cybercrime to financial institutions exceeds $18 million.

Earlier today, a serious flaw was discovered in the widely used Java logging library Apache Log4j. The vulnerability, ‘Log4Shell,’ was first identified by users of a popular Minecraft forum and was apparently disclosed to the Apache Foundation by Alibaba Cloud security researchers on Nov. 24, 2021. The vulnerability has the potential to allow unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on nearly any machine using Log4j.

Log4j zero-day vulnerability is flooding the security updates/news everywhere. This issue has been named Log4shell and assigned CVE-2021-44228 (still awaiting analysis at the time of writing).

Apache has released version 2.16.0, which completely removes support for Message Lookups and disables JNDI by default. CrowdStrike has identified a malicious Java class file hosted on infrastructure associated with a nation-state adversary. The Java code is used to download known instances of adversary-specific tooling and is likely to be used in conjunction with the recently disclosed Log4Shell exploit (CVE-2021-44228).

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Earlier this week I saw quite a few posts on Twitter mentioning AWS outages. Certainly caused a few issues.

On December 10th, 2021, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) published the CVE-2021-44228 documenting a vulnerability in the Apache log4j library Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) lookup feature allowing for remote code execution by an attacker who is able to manipulate log messages. A proof of concept was released on December 9th, 2021, and active scanning and exploitation attempts have increased through the time of the publishing of this brief.