On March 29, 2022, a critical vulnerability targeting the Spring Java framework was disclosed. This vulnerability was initially confused with a vulnerability in Spring Cloud, CVE-2022-22963. However, it was later identified as a separate vulnerability inside Spring Core, now tracked as CVE-2022-22965 and canonically named Spring4Shell.
Our security researchers, engineers, and our Crowdsource community are actively working on understanding the vulnerabilities and developing tests. We have received a dozen POCs already and anticipate more over the coming days. While the situation is rapidly developing, here is what we know so far. The Spring Cloud Function vulnerability (CVE-2022-22963) was disclosed and patched earlier this week.
On Wednesday 30th March 2022, news was disclosed online about an unauthenticated RCE zero-day vulnerability in Spring Core, a framework for building modern Java-based enterprise applications.
“Never click unexpected links!” Ever hear someone yell this? Virtually every person in tech has a healthy suspicion of random links; it is for a good reason. Every now and then there are huge leaks from industry leaders as a result of a targeted campaign. One of the most reliable ways to “phish” someone, or exfiltrate their credentials, is to abuse an open redirect vulnerability in a safe-looking website and redirect the victims to a malicious one.
On Thursday, March 31st a patch for a widely used Java framework called the Spring Framework was given the designation CVE-2022-22965 with a CVSS Score of 9.8. That’s bad news for a lot of companies that make use of this framework for delivery of their web applications, services and APIs. This is a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability and the ease of exploitation is partly why it has earned a 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS Score.
On March 29, 2022, details of a zero-day vulnerability in Spring Framework (CVE-2022-22965) were leaked. For many, this is reminiscent of the zero-day vulnerability in Log4j (CVE-2021-44228) back in December 2021.
On March 29th, the cyberkendra security blog posted a sensational post about a Log4Shell-equivalent zero-day vulnerability in Spring Framework, but without any solid details about the vulnerability itself.
On March 30, 2022, a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability was found in the Spring Framework. More specifically, it is part of the spring-beans package, a transitive dependency in both spring-webmvc and spring-webflux. This vulnerability is another example of why securing the software supply chain is important to open source.
