Ever since the public exploit of the Log4Shell remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability became known on December 10, 2021, security teams have been scrambling to understand the risk to their environments. Part of that scramble has been to ascertain which tools are best positioned to help detect the vulnerability. Which approaches are most effective and where do they fall short?

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 world of cybersecurity has been constantly challenged since the pandemic started. With the dust still settling, a new concern has taken the entire cyber landscape by storm. A flaw in Log4j, a widely used Java-based logging library, allows hackers unbridled access to computer systems. The vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) affects everything from the cloud to security devices. Attackers have come up with worms that can spread independently from one vulnerable system to another.

The situation involving the log4j ( log4shell ) vulnerability has been rapidly evolving since its release a little over a week ago. A new exploit, CVE-2021-45046, was found which was not covered by the initial 2.15.0 patch. Not long after the 2.16.0 patch was released, another issue was found, CVE-2021-45105, which resulted in the release of 2.17.0. There is clearly a lot going on in the log4j library.

The Log4j vulnerability burst onto the scene just a few weeks ago, but to many defenders it already feels like a lifetime. It has rapidly become one of the top concerns for security teams in 2021, and seems set to remain so for the foreseeable future. The critical details of this threat evolve almost daily, making it a formidable challenge for defenders to keep tabs on the threat and their organizations’ exposure.

In our recent webinar, Log4j Log4Shell Vulnerability Explained: All You Need To Know, our Senior Director Security Research expert Shachar Menashe shared information on the security issue and how to detect and remediate it. We are happy to share additional information in the following Q&A, based on the questions raised during the webinar.