On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community.
Security is a vital part of application development, yet it may be neglected until an attacker takes advantage of a vulnerability in the system. The consequences of a security breach can damage an application’s integrity as well as a company’s reputation and revenue. Software architects and engineers need to pay special attention to securing the systems they work on.
A summary of the Log4j vulnerability, and key takeaways for SREs.
Log4j, the popular open-source logging library, had a rough December and closed out the year with an impressive streak of four critical vulnerabilities so far. Many are calling this the worst cybersecurity event in history. Again, so far.
Shortly before the December holidays, a vulnerability in the ubiquitous Log4J library arrived like the Grinch, Scrooge, and Krampus rolled into one monstrous bundle of Christmas misery. Log4J maintainers went to work patching the exploit, and security teams scrambled to protect millions of exposed applications before they got owned. At Cribl, we put together multiple resources to help security teams detect and prevent the Log4J vulnerability using LogStream.
As CVE-2021-44228, a.k.a "Log4Shell" or Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution vulnerability continues to send shockwaves across the world of software, many security vendors and practitioners are rushing to provide recommendations on dealing with the crisis. If you need immediate help mitigating the impact of Log4shell, we're here for that. But the goal of this post is to look forward. This isn't the first and won't be the last high-impact vulnerability to be uncovered. So it's worth preparing your organization for the next one, so that you can respond faster, mitigate and remediate sooner - and have fewer weekends like the last one.
You have probably heard of Log4Shell, the security vulnerability that has ‘earned’ itself an NIST rank of 10: In this post I will show a really basic example of how this vulnerability actually works. I will walk you through some basic usage of the Log4J library and then show how some fairly basic inputs into this library can cause truly unexpected, and potentially disastrous, outcomes.
