Hundreds of millions of devices around the world could be exposed to a newly revealed software vulnerability, as a senior Biden administration cyber official warned executives from major U.S. industries Monday that they need to take action to address “one of the most serious” flaws she has seen in her career.
As major tech firms struggle to contain the fallout, U.S. officials held a call with industry executives warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability.
For now, cybersecurity analysts told CNN, the pressure is on tech companies to clean up their software code and on big businesses to figure out if they are affected by the flaw. But because the vulnerability is so widespread, and likely present in things like popular apps and websites, consumers could also feel the fallout if those services get hacked.
“This vulnerability is one of the most serious that I’ve seen in my entire career, if not the most serious,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said on a phone call shared with CNN. Big financial firms and health care executives attended the phone briefing.
“We expect the vulnerability to be widely exploited by sophisticated actors and we have limited time to take necessary steps in order to reduce the likelihood of damaging incidents,” Easterly said.
It’s the starkest warning yet from U.S. officials about the software flaw since news broke late last week that hackers were using it to try to break into organizations’ computer networks. It’s also a test of new channels that federal officials have set up for working with industry executives after the widespread hacks exploiting SolarWinds and Microsoft software revealed in the last year.
The vulnerability, known as CVE-2021-44228, was disclosed on Dec. 9, which allows remote access to servers and code execution, some experts have said. Meanwhile, Log4j is used in a large number of enterprise systems, raising concerns that it may be easily exploited.
Since the vulnerability, which some dubbed “Log4Shell,” so is widespread and is likely present in highly-trafficked websites and apps, users may also see their favorite websites and apps be impacted.
Cybersecurity firms Mandiant and Crowdstrike said that hacking groups are trying to breach systems, and Mandiant described to Reuters that they are “Chinese government actors,” in reference to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Given that Log4j has been a ubiquitous logging solution for Enterprise Java development for decades, Log4j has the potential to become a vulnerability that will persist within Industrial Control Systems (ICS) environments for years to come,” according to a blog post by cybersecurity researchers at Dragos.
A cybercriminal can exploit the flaw by sending a malicious code string that will get logged by the Log4j version, allowing the attacker to load an arbitrary Java code to a server. The vulnerability could potentially allow them to take control of the server.
Federal cybersecurity officials also reportedly expressed alarm over the vulnerability in recent days.
The proverbial canary in the coal mine was when researchers noted that Minecraft’s servers could be compromised via the vulnerability. Microsoft last week posted instructions for how players could update the game’s Java version.
“This exploit affects many services—including Minecraft Java Edition,” said Microsoft. “This vulnerability poses a potential risk of your computer being compromised.”
In another stark warning, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote Friday that his firm has “made the determination that Log4J is so bad we’re going to try and roll out at least some protection for all Cloudflare customers by default, even free customers who do not have our [enterprise suite]. Working on how to do that safely now.”
“It’s a design failure of catastrophic proportions,” Free Wortley, the CEO of the open-source data security platform LunaSec, wrote on its website last week.
Elaborating on what services could be targeted via the exploit, Wortley said that “Cloud services like Steam, Apple iCloud, and apps like Minecraft” have been discovered to be vulnerable. “Anybody using Apache Struts is likely vulnerable. We’ve seen similar vulnerabilities exploited before in breaches like the 2017 Equifax data breach,” he said, referring to the hack that released millions of people’s credit data.
Last week, CISA issued an alert over the vulnerability, as did Australia’s cybersecurity agency. The Apache Software Foundation rates the vulnerability as “critical” and published ways to deal with it on Friday.
“The internet’s on fire right now,” warned Adam Meyers, a senior vice president with Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch,” he told The Associated Press, “and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.”
The CNN Wire and Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report