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?!”
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.
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.
??? What the what now?
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.)
Yeah. It was frustrating cos it was reported as a Java flaw whereas is was really just a wtf were you thinking??? issue