December 17, 2021
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) has set December 24 as the deadline for security patches to be applied by federal agencies.
These and other security advisories became necessary due to the growing importance of the Log4j flaw that is massively being exploited by attackers.
The agency instructed federal agencies to “mitigate” the vulnerability by patching IT systems with new software by December 24. In the last four months, Log4J the code containing the flaw was downloaded 84 million times.
The heightened fears surrounding the bug are necessary due to the ease with which the bug could be exploited by attackers.
John Graham-Cumming, chief technical officer of Cloudflare, explained: “For example, when you buy something online, your username might be written to a log file for later processing. Unfortunately, a flaw in Log4j meant that by using special characters in data that is logged, it is possible to get a machine inside a company to run code that an attacker controls. This gives them a foothold inside what would normally be a secure, protected computer.”
For more information, read the original story on the BBC.
