Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Since 2019, Snyk and Dynatrace have partnered with a shared mission of securing the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and accelerating digital transformation. As many agile organizations migrate their workloads to the cloud, it’s tempting for teams to let security take a back-seat until all the pieces of the infrastructure puzzle are in place.

After successful deployment to Arctic Wolf’s customer community of more than 2,300 organizations worldwide, today we are making “Log4Shell Deep Scan” publicly available on GitHub. Log4Shell Deep Scan enables detection of both CVE-2021-45046 and CVE-2021-44228 within nested JAR files, as well as WAR and EAR files.

It’s the last Patch Tuesday update of 2021, and as with many other updates this year, this month’s list includes important ones — among them a zero-day (CVE-2021-43890 in AppX installer), multiple critical vulnerabilities and a variety of attack types utilized in several Microsoft product families — highlighting once again that patching and prioritization are prominent programs SecOps staff must regularly implement to keep adversaries from infiltrating their organizations’

For more information on how to respond to the Log4j vulnerabilities using Splunk products, please see our Log4Shell response overview page. Like most cybersecurity teams, the Splunk Threat Research Team (STRT) has been heads-down attempting to understand, simulate, and detect the Log4j attack vector. This post shares detection opportunities STRT found in different stages of successful Log4Shell exploitation.

A critical vulnerability has been recently discovered in the Apache Log4j Java logging library (CVE-2021-44228), a library used in many client and server applications. The Log4j library is commonly included in Java based software including multiple Apache frameworks such as Struts2, Solr, Druid and Fink. The library provides enhanced logging functionality for Java applications and is commonly used in business system development.

On Nov. 24th 2021 a severe security vulnerability, called “Log4Shell”, has been reported in the JAVA framework “Log4J” 2.x which is widely used for event logging in JAVA applications worldwide. The vulnerability allows cyber-attackers to execute arbitrary code by injecting it into a logging process implemented in Log4J. The “Log4Shell” vulnerability allows complete server takeover by the attackers.

Log4Shell is a high severity vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) impacting Apache Log4j versions 2.0 to 2.14.1. It was discovered by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud Security Team and disclosed via the project´s GitHub repository on December 9, 2021.

Sideloading is the installation of software from a third party rather than an approved source, for example applications that are not available from official vendors or app stores. This hack is creating yet another valuable opportunity for cybercriminals.