Over the past couple weeks there have been many news reports on the vulnerabilities within Log4j. These pieces of content accurately describe what can wrong when companies, individual or teams of developers have their Log4j software compromised.
The technology community is releasing cybersecurity data on the different viruses that are connecting to Log4j, and it is something so widespread that it is affecting many websites and applications that are connected to the internet, as well as development environments-making it more difficult for software engineers to develop code that is free of viruses.
In order to examine the magnitude of this situation, it is important to look at Log4j for what it truly is; many readers are confusing it with the actual viruses. Log4j is a software that can be used by developers to use log files in order to keep track of the activities that take place during the process of software engineering.
The software can keep track of how users are interacting with authentication, the changes that are made to the code for a website or application, and it has hundreds of other settings that can be applied in order to provide companies with certain data and metrics.
The Log4j software is intended to be a useful product for the development process. However, it is now being exploited at an alarming rate, which is adversely affecting the cybersecurity of the products and services for many companies.
A frequent example of the vulnerability, would be contact forms and comment sections of websites and apps. If a hacker wants to post a malicious link in either section of the application, Log4j will take these links and turn them into executable files and then launch whatever content is present on the webpage that the link provided. If the link sends the software to malicious code, then it will automatically launch it on the company’s servers, thereby making it possible for their business operations to be compromised or deleted.
This vulnerability is affecting hundreds of thousands of websites and apps. It is currently viewed as the most serious emerging cybersecurity threat today. The question that all Chief Technology Officers have is “what can we do to stop this?”
Fortunately, there are some things that can be done to prevent malicious code from attaching itself to Log4j. The first preventative strategy is to launch Log4j software and adjust the settings. The program can be set to not make executable files from any other website or application that is outside the company’s system architecture. This is a strong preventative step, but it can also slow down the development process because some parts of websites and apps have no other choice but to direct to outside URLs in order to have certain features for their products (especially those written in the Java programming language).
When dealing with the Log4j vulnerability there needs to be some kind of compromise taken place during the mitigation process. Perhaps the company should look into alternative software to install on servers just in case they experience anything detrimental with Log4j. If companies continue to commit to using the software, then they should have an auditing process that examines all source code in order to find viruses and bugs.
Also, using the settings on Log4j by allowing it to make executable files when necessary for development, and incorporating the settings when engineers are not in the development process would be a good prevention strategy. It may be more time consuming to continuously make adjustments for Log4j, but right now that may be the strongest preventative step that can be taken by companies.
