The high risk associated with newly discovered vulnerabilities in the highly popular Apache Log4j library – CVE-2021-44228 (also known as Log4Shell) and CVE-2021-45046 – has led to a security frenzy of unusual scale and urgency. Developers and security teams are pressed to investigate the impact of Log4j vulnerabilities on their software, revealing multiple technical challenges in the process.

The discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability in the ubiquitous Apache Log4j package is a singular event in terms of both its impact and severity. Over 1 million attack attempts exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability were detected within days after it was exposed, and it may take years before we see its full impact.

At many organizations, the surprise discovery that the widely used Apache log4j open source software has harbored a longtime critical vulnerability was as if Scrooge and the Grinch had teamed up for the biggest holiday heist of all. Incident response teams across the globe have scrambled to remediate thousands, if not millions of applications. “For cybercriminals this is Christmas come early,” explained Theresa Payton, former White House CIO and current CEO of Fortalice Solutions.

Accelerating software distribution is a critical part to enabling enterprise delivery at scale. Throughout the SDLC processes, we’re required to continuously distribute software packages — either to remote development teams as part of CI cycles, to production environments or devices for deployments, or for public downloads by your developers or partners ecosystem. The key attributes of Distribution workflows create network challenges around bandwidth, resiliency and availability.

Accelerating software distribution is a critical part of the modern DevOps stack. Modern application development has created new challenges around distribution at scale, leading organizations to rethink their software distribution infrastructure.

In our recent webinar, Log4j Log4Shell Vulnerability Explained: All You Need To Know, our Senior Director Security Research expert Shachar Menashe shared information on the security issue and how to detect and remediate it. We are happy to share additional information in the following Q&A, based on the questions raised during the webinar.

Last week, a researcher from the Alibaba Cloud Security Team dropped a zero-day remote code execution exploit on Twitter, targeting the extremely popular log4j logging framework for Java (specifically, the 2.x branch called Log4j2). The vulnerability was originally discovered and reported to Apache by the Alibaba cloud security team on November 24th. MITRE assigned CVE-2021-44228 to this vulnerability, which has since been dubbed Log4Shell by security researchers.