Over the last few weeks, security teams everywhere have been busy patching Log4J vulnerabilities. In this article we want to talk about the three things you can tell your friends why this is way worse.
Ubiquity
This vulnerability impacts impacts Java applications and those can be found almost anywhere: enterprise, vendor applications, database drivers, Android phones and even the smartchip on the credit card in your wallet (Java Card). Additionally, majority of Java applications use log4j to handle logging, often involving user input. While your phone is probably not exploitable, the sheer number of places where log4j can be hiding makes this is hard to fix.
Severity
There are vulnerabilities that come out all the time, but few of them reach the highest possible level of severity: remote code execution (RCE) and this one hits that ticket. That means that every server running Java within your company becomes everyone’s computer – an attacker can run anything they want there and then use that as a springboard to tunnel in further.
Exploitability
There are many severe vulnerabilities out there that require specialized knowledge to exploit including speaking dead computer languages and building weird binaries during a full moon. With this one, you can begin the exploit by copy/pasting a tweet into a search bar combined with DNS.