On Dec. 9, word of a newly discovered computer bug in a hugely popular piece of computer code started rippling around the cybersecurity community.
By the next day, nearly every major software company was in crisis mode, trying to figure out how its products were affected and how it could patch the hole. According to the Philadelphia Enquirer, The descriptions used by security experts to describe the new vulnerability in an extremely common section of code called log4j border on the apocalyptic.
“The log4j vulnerability is the most serious vulnerability I have seen in my decades-long career,” Jen Easterly, security director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an interview last week on CNBC. So why is this obscure piece of software causing so much panic, and should regular computer users be worried?
Log4j is a chunk of code that helps software applications keep track of their past activities. Instead of reinventing a “logging” — or record-keeping — component each time developers build new software, they often use existing code such as log4j instead.
It’s free on the Internet and very widely used, appearing in a “big chunk” of Internet services, according to Asaf Ashkenazi, chief operating officer of security company Verimatrix. Each time log4j is asked to log something new, it tries to make sense of that new entry and add it to the record.
A few weeks ago, the cybersecurity community realized that by simply asking the program to log a line of malicious code, it would execute that code in the process, effectively letting bad actors grab control of servers that are running log4j. READ MORE
