The notorious Log4Shell vulnerability CVE-2021-45046, has put Log4j in the spotlight, and grabbed the entire Java community’s attention over the last couple of weeks. Maintainers of Java projects that use Log4j have most probably addressed the issue. Meanwhile, non-java developers are enjoying relative peace of mind, knowing that they are unaffected by one of the major vulnerabilities found in recent years. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect assumption.

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

At many organizations, the surprise discovery that the widely used Apache log4j open source software has harbored a longtime critical vulnerability was as if Scrooge and the Grinch had teamed up for the biggest holiday heist of all. Incident response teams across the globe have scrambled to remediate thousands, if not millions of applications. “For cybercriminals this is Christmas come early,” explained Theresa Payton, former White House CIO and current CEO of Fortalice Solutions.

Note: This post first appeared in r/CrowdStrike. First and foremost: if you’re reading this post, I hope you’re doing well and have been able to achieve some semblance of balance between life and work. It has been, I think we can all agree, a wild December in cybersecurity (again). At this time, it’s very likely that you and your team are in the throes of hunting, assessing and patching implementations of Log4j2 in your environment.

The last week has been a wild ride for just about everyone in the technology world due to the public disclosure of the Log4Shell vulnerability. As a developer security company, Snyk has built our business around proactive automation to identify and fix security issues in applications. To say we’ve been busy this week would be an understatement.

With great automation, comes great risk. The advent of infrastructure as code brought about automation for the tedium of deploying, provisioning, and managing resources in public clouds with declarative scripts. However, this automation increased the importance of creating secure IaC scripts or configurations with cloud infrastructure misconfigurations being cited as the biggest area of increased concern (58%) from 2020 to 2021 in the 2021 Snyk Cloud Native Application Security report.

The recently discovered Log4j vulnerability has serious potential to expose organizations across the globe to a new wave of cybersecurity risks as threat actors look to exploit this latest vulnerability to execute their malicious payloads using remote code execution (RCE). An immediate challenge that every organization faces is simply trying to understand exactly where you have applications that are using this very popular Java library — but you are not facing this challenge alone.