

Easterly cautioned that the situation “presents an urgent challenge to network defenders.” In the rapidly evolving threat actor landscape, these are some noteworthy observations: Threat actors exploiting Log4j have been known to conduct malicious activity including crypto-mining, ransomware, and data theft in the past. Since the announcement of the vulnerability, there have been publications by agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and others regarding identifying vulnerable applications and necessary mitigating actions to prevent exposure.ĬISA Director Jen Easterly stated that the ubiquity of Log4j allows for a myriad of malicious actors to carry out a variety of criminal activities. The situation illustrates the importance of close monitoring in order to ensure your organization’s remediation efforts are sufficient and appropriately prioritized.ĭue to Log4j’s use as a component in building software, it is difficult to determine whether you are impacted.
APACHE ANT LOG4J VULNERABILITY SOFTWARE
The vulnerabilities themselves have been reassessed based on new findings as well as the software versions affected. As the cybersecurity community progresses in their response, the situation has continued to rapidly evolve.
APACHE ANT LOG4J VULNERABILITY CODE
These vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-45046, CVE-2021-45105, and CVE-2021-4104) have varying levels of severity and impact that range from remote code execution to denial of service. Since the Decemadvisory, there have been additional vulnerabilities discovered that affect the Log4j application. The result of successful Log4j vulnerability exploitation is remote code execution, allowing a malicious actor to control a computer and use it in support of ransomware campaigns, data exfiltration, creating a backdoor for later use, or any other number of nefarious activities.The Log4j vulnerability is trivial to exploit.Log4j is very commonly deployed in Java applications.

The Log4j vulnerability was assigned CVE-2021-44228 and has a CVSS rating of 10 (critical) for three primary reasons: Log4j is a Java-based logging system commonly used in commercial and proprietary Java and other web and server applications. On December 10, 2021, Apache released an advisory for a critical vulnerability in the Log4j version 2.x application. On January 4, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned that "It is critical that companies and their vendors relying on Log4j act now, in order to reduce the likelihood of harm to consumers, and to avoid FTC legal action." Additionally, the FTC has expressed a desire to further evaluate the dependency on open-source services and the potential impact on customers.
