The Log4Shell critical vulnerability that impacted millions of enterprise applications remains a common cause for security breaches a year after it received patches and widespread attention and is expected to remain a popular target for some time to come. Its long-lasting impact highlights the major risks posed by flaws in transitive software dependencies and the need for enterprises to urgently adopt software composition analysis and secure supply chain management practices
Log4Shell, officially tracked as CVE-2021-44228, was discovered in December 2021 in Log4j, a widely popular open-source Java library that’s used for logging. Initially disclosed as a zero-day, the project’s developers quickly created a patch, but getting that patch widely adopted and deployed proved challenging because it relies on developers who used this component in their software to release their own updates.