No sooner did word start to spread about Apache Log4j that the usual torrent of blaring headlines, vendor marketing, and tips and tricks-style “information” quickly followed. You can find plenty of solid technical analysis out there about Log4j, and we’ve already posted information about Netskope protections and threat coverage from Netskope Threat Labs.
But that’s not this post.
This post is meant to provide some perspective from decades spent in CISO roles, and from many days now of peer conversations with other CISOs and CIOs—the same types of conversations that happen any time something happens like Log4j or SolarWinds, or take your pick of security incidents with significant blast radius, impact, and longer-term concern.
That’s not to minimize the concern, not at all; Log4j is one of the biggest security issues we’ve all seen this year and one, less than a week into its discovery, that we’re only starting to understand. But it’s easy to get weighed down in hype, marketing, and speculation and forget that there are important things we need to do, right now, to improve our posture, strengthen our team, and put us in a better position for the next Log4j.
Here’s some CISO advice:
Lead with empathy and reach out to your security circles.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: security professionals, CISOs or otherwise, tend to have each other’s backs. Use that to make progress. Have empathy for each other and for your teams. It’s the holiday season, we’re still in a pandemic, and we are all working hard to limit exposure from products our organizations consume and develop.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week reaching out to my CISO circles, and I’ve been heartened, but not surprised, to find that we’re already working through this together, sharing success, failures, and opportunities. Remember: your simple mitigation may be someone else’s lifeline idea, because they may be lacking a ready-made solution to what, in Log4j, is already a complicated security problem.
Get the clearest possible understanding of what’s happening in your environment.
Log4j, in both what it can do and what we as technology leaders need to do to solve it, is fundamentally a cyber hygiene and visibility-and-control issue. The technology is well within hand to reveal everything to us about what apps we have running in the cloud—we’re just not always building our security infrastructure in the most effective manner to take advantage of that.
As Netskope Threat Labs researcher Gustavo Palazolo noted to Dark Reading, “One of the main challenges that organizations face is identifying all compromised assets. The Log4j Apache Java-based logging library is very popular and can be used by many applications, as well as by IoT devices and legacy systems that are maintained for backwards compatibility. Even if an application is found to be vulnerable, updating it might be difficult because an organization may not be able to afford the downtime or lack proper patch management controls. Therefore, the time between identifying all compromised systems and fixing the problem can take a long time in some scenarios.”
This is solvable with the right infrastructure that can provide you with the most granular visibility, context, and latitude to take action on what you’re seeing.
Identify your true partners and make changes to those you do business with.
Day-by-day, and especially minute-by-minute, we often fail to document great ideas, points of insight, or things that will he