Log4Shell has justified criticism of modern security approaches as perhaps one of the most damaging software bugs ever discovered. It also turns out that far too many individuals still think about security in terms of securing network perimeters.
However, Log4Shell showed the huge gap that exists between application security and observability in the still-developing realm of cloud computing. The fact that observability makes systems safer is still not commonly acknowledged.
The high number of companies still experiencing the effects of Log4Shell nearly six months after the incident is proof. It all boils down to: Lack of visibility and inadequate vulnerability management have hampered efforts to discover and fix third-party software and development environments.
Securing complex, distributed, and high-speed cloud systems is what protection means. To do this, businesses must embrace a contemporary development stack that gives security managers more visibility and better vulnerability management.
Application Security Tools of the Past Too Many Unanswered Questions
Log4Shell, a software vulnerability in Apache Log4j 2 discovered in November 2021, has been dubbed by analysts and journalists as potentially one of the most damaging flaws ever disclosed. The software flaw "bordered on the apocalyptic," according to several security experts.
Let us not forget: the security business is not doomed because of a single flaw. That was demonstrated in March when Spring4Shell, a significant vulnerability in Java's popular Spring open-source framework, was discovered.
Traditional detection approaches are too slow, inefficient, and leave too many issues unresolved for businesses to find risks. In the past, security teams ran a static analysis on code libraries called software composition analysis (SCA) to see if a vulnerability had affected their systems.
Scanning tools and manual techniques are used in an SCA. These methods are designed to find vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle, not to uncover problems in code that have already been deployed.
Furthermore, SCA technologies are known to generate a large number of false positives since they lack critical information such as the possible impact of vulnerability occurrences or if the concerned repository is in production or a pre-production setting.
They also don't give much information about which areas are most vulnerable or should be emphasized.
Vulnerability Detection and Mitigation
Application security platforms should generate a prioritized list of potentially affected systems, as well as the degree of exposure and the capacity for teams to execute immediate remediation. A panel for application security repair tracking for each vulnerability also aids security teams in identifying and highlighting whether each impacted process still has a vulnerability loaded. When each incidence of the problem is remedied, observability-enabled application security technologies close the vulnerability report and reopen it if a new instance of the problem is discovered.
Incident and response
Log4Shell-specific threat monitoring and incident detection can be built up using application security and observability features. This immediately identifies Log4Shell log patterns, and teams may establish alerting systems for assaults on their environments using platform log analytics and alerting capabilities. Metrics and alerting systems also provide you access to the underlying code, allowing you to rapidly put up a dedicated alerting system for any successful attacks on this important vulnerability.
The right AppSec technologies can help security teams detect vulnerabilities like Log4Shell and Spring4Shell in real-time and conduct immediate repairs at scale by continuously monitoring an organization's production environments.