this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Log4j was a fun one to watch unfold everywhere when things went haywire
The neat thing about the log4j thing was even a cursory explanation of the vulnerability made anyone with a passing familiarity with security say, "Why the fuck would that even be a feature?!"
What was it?
https://theconversation.com/what-is-log4j-a-cybersecurity-expert-explains-the-latest-internet-vulnerability-how-bad-it-is-and-whats-at-stake-173896
Basically it involved parsing JNDI stuff which involved grabbing remote code (but that was a niche feature of JNDI in the Dev's defense). Basically, you may think it is just something like variable substitution but can involve much crazier stuff.
Edit: and for more context, JNDI is typically a thing for getting a database connection stored on the application server. The idea being you just ask for "customer database" and don't have to define the connection in the code. The server has it defined elsewhere. So in each environment it works the same. Basically glorified and standardized config file type of thing.
this is cool
Wait until you learn that PDFs support embedded Javascript.
At this point, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that PDFs support embedded ELF executables.
(I'm pretty sure they don't, but ... seriously, it's PDF.)
????????? What the what now?
Yeah. It was frustrating cos it was reported as a Java flaw whereas is was really just a wtf were you thinking??? issue
That was not a fun week to be a developer.
As a non-java company developer at the time, I think our biggest challenge was explaining to everyone that Log4j didn't affect us. It took a non-zero amount of effort because a lot of customers panicked. To be fair, it was also an industry where confidentiality is important.
Also a lot of people were pulling it transitively.
It was if none of your code used log4j. I remember being very grateful that I had chosen
java.util.loggingand Logback for my Java logging needs.Lol, yeah for us we didn't own any of the code that used it but depended on server software made internally that did. At the time we managed our own hosts, so it was a long week of deployments.
Oh man. I missed it by like a month. I graduated with my bachelors in December, and started in January. I was hearing horror stories from my new coworkers about how people had to cancel vacations to get stuff patched asap
That one was so annoying because you had to be using the log server to have any issues. If your network was locked down, the log server was disabled, or if you happened to be using a version that was from before the log server was added, then there were no issues. But clients just heard "log4j" and thought it was unsafe.
'clients' are really dumb sometimes...
Couldn't remember which logging library it was, thanks for mentioning it, it would have low-key bugged me all day.
Came here looking exactly for this answer. What a week that was... And the next ones too