Since 2009, more than 12 years ago, all major Linux distributions have been incorporating a high severity security hole that remained unnoticed until just recently. The vulnerability and exploit, dubbed “PwnKit” (CVE-2021-4034), uses the vulnerable “pkexec” tool, and allows a local user to gain root system privileges on the affected host. Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems.

At first glance, DevSecOps and Agile can seem like different things. In reality, the methodologies often complement each other. Let’s see how. Agile is a methodology that aims to give teams flexibility during software development. DevSecOps is about adding automated security to an existing automated software development process. Both are methodologies that require high levels of communication between different stakeholders and continuous improvement as part of the process.

​​Since December 10, in a span of just 20 days, there have been four different vulnerabilities published against Log4j. Engineers who worked long hours to update their Log4j versions to 2.15.0 on December 11th, were told three days later that they needed to do it all over again and upgrade to version 2.16.0. This is not sustainable. And yet the risks are high. Looking backward, we see that Log4j has been vulnerable since 2013 to the kinds of attacks described in CVE-2021-44228.