Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2021 Edition

Microsoft, Adobe, and Google all issued security updates to their products today. The Microsoft patches include six previously disclosed security flaws, and one that is already being actively exploited. But this month’s Patch Tuesday is overshadowed by the “Log4Shell” 0-day exploit in a popular Java library that web server administrators are now racing to find and patch amid widespread exploitation of the flaw.



Log4Shell is the name picked for a critical flaw disclosed Dec. 9 in the popular logging library for Java called “log4j,” which is included in a huge number of Java applications. Publicly released exploit code allows an attacker to force a server running a vulnerable log4j library to execute commands, such as downloading malicious software or opening a backdoor connection to the server.


According to researchers at Lunasec, many, many services are vulnerable to this exploit.


“Cloud services like Steam, Apple iCloud, and apps like Minecraft have already been found to be vulnerable,” Lunasec wrote. “Anybody using Apache Struts is likely vulnerable. We’ve seen similar vulnerabilities exploited before in breaches like the 2017 Equifax data breach. An extensive list of responses from impacted organizations has been compiled here.”


“If you run a server built on open-source software, there’s a good chance you are impacted by this vulnerability,” said Dustin Childs of Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Check with all the vendors in your enterprise to see if they are impacted and what patches are available.”


Part of the difficulty in patching against the Log4Shell attack is identifying ..

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