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# CSRB Log4j Report - The Response is as Dangerous as the Vulnerability

The recent report from the CSRB gives a step by step
 account of Log4j, from discovery to remediation, and
 uncovers a painful insight - sometimes the response is
 just as dangerous as the vulnerability.

The recent report from the CSRB gives a step by step
 account of Log4j, from discovery to remediation, and
 uncovers a painful insight - sometimes the response is
 just as dangerous as the vulnerability.

The recent report from the CSRB gives a step by step
 account of Log4j, from discovery to remediation, and
 uncovers a painful insight - sometimes the response is
 just as dangerous as the vulnerability.

## [Open Report](#)

## [View Report](#embed)

Written by

Jamie Scott

Published on

July 14, 2022

Updated on

August 25, 2025

Topics

[Opinion](/learn/opinion)

[Security](/learn/security)

The recent report from the CSRB gives a step by step
 account of Log4j, from discovery to remediation, and
 uncovers a painful insight - sometimes the response
 is just as dangerous as the vulnerability.

The recent report from the CSRB gives a step by step
 account of Log4j, from discovery to remediation, and
 uncovers a painful insight - sometimes the response
 is just as dangerous as the vulnerability.

## [Open Report](#)

## [View Report](#embed)

Summarize with AI

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The [Cyber Safety Review Board](https://www.cisa.gov/cyber-safety-review-board) (CSRB) just released their [report](https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CSRB-Report-on-Log4-July-11-2022_508.pdf) on the Log4j vulnerability, [CVE-2021-44228](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-44228), and it’s a fascinating read. The report (which it should be
 noted - is incredibly well written) illustrates a painful fact -
 the operational overhead of dealing with a major vulnerability
 is as dangerous as the vulnerability itself, if not more so.

The CSRB worked with over 80 organizations to understand exactly
 what happened with Log4j, step by step. They recount how the
 vulnerability was introduced in 2013 through a
 community-submitted feature intended to ease data storage and
 retrieval called “JNDI Lookup plugin support”. Then how the
 vulnerability was discovered by the Alibaba Cloud security team
 in November 2021, and how the Apache Software Foundation acted
 fast to remidient. And then how all hell broke loose.

The report makes an interesting point about how much of the
 global response to the vulnerability “went right”. The
 cybersecurity and open source communities banded together as the
 race between attackers and defenders began, and everybody’s
 weekends were ruined. But even with the response generally being
 swift, many organizations suffered, while the CSRB notes that it
 was difficult to *“identify an authoritative source from which to understand
 exploitation trends across geographies, industries, or
 ecosystems”.*

So what happened? Security and development teams found
 themselves in a situation where they quickly had to answer the
 question “who’s using Log4j?” and the more difficult question of
 “who’s using something that uses Log4j?”. For most modern
 applications, 70% of code is code you didn’t write, but depend
 on through open source packages. A handful of these are direct
 dependencies selected by developers, but the majority are
 indirect dependencies automatically pulled into your projects.

This means that even smaller organizations needed to navigate a
 complex dependency graph to figure out what depends on Log4j.
 Beyond that, they didn’t have time to consider that “who uses
 Log4j” is an important question, but equally important is “which
 of those Log4j instances are actually reachable and
 exploitable?”

Our founders here at Endor Labs faced exactly these challenges
 when they were running a 400-person engineering team. A common
 occurrence they ran into was developers going on slack to ask
 “who’s using this dependency? I plan on updating it and you
 might be impacted.” Getting visibility into the dependency graph
 and analyzing the potential impact of something as common as an
 update was next to impossible. The problem was so prevalent that
 it eventually drove them to team up and start Endor Labs.

This is where we start seeing the true impact of Log4j, the
 amount of hours lost dealing with mitigating it. According to
 the report, “one federal cabinet department reported dedicating **33,000 hours** to Log4j vulnerability response to
 protect the department’s own networks. These costs, often
 sustained over many weeks and months, delayed other
 mission-critical work, including the response to other
 vulnerabilities.”

This problem is captured perfectly by this line in the report: *"Industry experts have called for increased automation to
 help organizations identify vulnerable software and execute
 Enterprise Risk Management at scale, but they also recognize
 that cataloging software components at this depth can be
 prohibitively labor intensive.* ***Solutions to enable these necessary capabilities do not
 exist.****"* We hope to change that with Endor Labs.

When it comes to open source security, solutions tend to fall
 into two major categories: vulnerability scanners (SCA), and
 continuous update solutions. By their nature, they address half
 the problem at the most. As we’ve seen, the true impact of Log4j
 was made apparent by a company’s ability to react to it quickly,
 and the overhead of that response was more dangerous than the
 vulnerability itself. The report event goes as far as to say
 that:

*“Perhaps most significantly, the force exerted on the urgent
 response and the challenges in managing risk also contributed
 to professional “burnout” among defenders that may, compounded
 with the generally intense pace of many cybersecurity jobs,
 have a long-term impact on the availability of cybersecurity
 talent.”*

Now that we’ve spent some time exploring the problem, let’s
 think about some of the solutions, and a bit of insight into
 what we’re building at Endor Labs.

## Contextually Aware Vulnerability Management Practices

Contextually aware vulnerability management practices can help
 improve vulnerability response times and reduce tangible and
 intangible response costs. Log4J has cost the national
 economy enormously in terms of both remediation costs as well as
 opportunity cost. The Cyber Safety Review Board highlights
 that *“Log4j is an ‘endemic vulnerability’ and that vulnerable
 instances of Log4j will remain in systems for many years to
 come, perhaps a decade or longer.”*

But how can this possibly be the case with the most widely
 publicized vulnerability in recent memory?

For many organizations the answer is one or more of these:

- It is prohibitively expensive to address the issue
 holistically
- A holistic application component inventory does not exist for
 the organization
- They are dependent on a third party, either open source or
 vendor supported and can’t accept the cost of migrating off or
 mitigating the risk in that dependency

For the first two problems the issue is often one of visibility
 and scale.

Scalable solutions don’t exist today that enable organizations
 to understand if a vulnerability applies in the context of their
 application and business. The lack of scalable assessment
 solutions has led to an industry paradigm where security
 practitioners are updating everything and making risk management
 decisions with only partial context. In many of these
 circumstances, if the organization had full context, patching
 for critical vulnerabilities would be made not a priority for an
 application because it didn’t apply in the context of the app.
 This includes scenarios where the package version is not used or
 where the package version is used but the vulnerable method is
 not.

Today, what happens is:  

- A vulnerability is discovered
- Vulnerabilities are published to vulnerability feeds that are
 consumed by vulnerability management solutions
- Vulnerability management solutions compare the package version
 with those listed in the vulnerability feed.
- If the package version exists in an application or server,
 then a vulnerability is reported.

This lacks three important pieces of context that are absolutely
 necessary to make informed risk management decisions:

1. How important the application is to the business
2. The relative likelihood of the application being
 attacked
3. The context of which the application uses the code.
4. When issues like log4j are exposed through indirect usage of
 the dependency, upgrades may not even be made available,
 resulting in reliance on self patching or waiting for another
 dependency to be updated.

Even if a security practitioner had all of this context, they
 would still need to understand if an update to the dependency
 may break their application, either through direct API breaking
 changes or dependency conflicts. While this may not be the case
 in a small patch release, it may be the case if the vulnerable
 dependency is indirectly used and not directly used in the
 code.

## How CISA and Industry Security Leaders Can Help

In order to help important vulnerabilities scale more
 effectively, CISA should partner with NIST to ensure that
 vulnerable methods are standard searchable fields that are
 applied to every applicable vulnerability in the National
 Vulnerability Database (NVD). This should be prioritized for
 vulnerabilities in the known exploited vulnerabilities
 catalog. By including this metadata, static analysis
 solutions will be able to detect vulnerabilities in a scalable
 manner down to the level of if the vulnerable method is actually
 being used.

Beyond the NVD, the foundation of vulnerability remediation is a
 software bill of materials. The Cyber Safety Review Board says: *“As designed today, SBOMs are limited, for example by
 variances in field descriptions and a lack of version
 information about cataloged components, and lack of automation
 on the consumption end due to these variances. Addressing SBOM
 standardization gaps would support a faster software supply
 chain vulnerability response.”*

Further, as the industry pushes to adopt and improve SBOM
 tooling the industry should focus on data quality and rates of
 change. Assuming that an SBOM did have accurate information
 about the versions of software packages, and had high fidelity
 accurate data at all times, an SBOM is limited in that it is
 only a snapshot in time and doesn’t evolve over time. Even if
 the same version of an application is deployed the dependencies
 of the application are frequently continuously changing with no
 action required by development teams or customers.

While [dependency pinning](https://betterdev.blog/pin-exact-dependency-versions/) has been designed to reduce the likelihood of operational issues
 from dependency changes over time, it's unlikely that all of
 your direct dependencies have pinned every one of their
 dependencies. Dependency pinning is a practice that has
 clustered usage throughout the industry and as a result, it's
 very frequent that as your dependencies release new versions of
 your package, the SBOM will change without any action on the
 part of the software producer or software consumer.

[Lockfiles](https://nodejs.dev/learn/the-package-lock-json-file) do solve this, but their support is package manager dependent
 and not supported everywhere.

This moving target problem make SBOMs a snapshot proxy to
 improve vulnerability management but not an accurate inventory
 that can be fully trusted. Enabling SBOM tooling to track
 changes over time, and encouraging the use of dependency pinning
 and lockfiles where applicable should also be key
 recommendations for the cybersecurity industry.

## The Risks of Requiring Financial Commitments in OSS Projects

Software is the foundation on which society is built. Traffic
 lights, cars, and water supply are controlled using software.
 The foundation on which software is built is open source
 software, such as log4j. Our society is built on the backs of
 the giants who are the maintainers of the open source community.
 This community is volunteer, sometimes sponsored but frequently
 free. Often, maintainers of open source packages do so out of
 good will as a side project from the comfort of their homes.
 They have families and other priorities, just like all of us.
 Sponsoring of these volunteers is a noble pursuit, but requiring
 financial commitments from organizations using open source
 software may be an impractical solution. The Cyber Safety Review
 Board indicates that *“Private sector companies that build commercial software that
 includes open source libraries or dependencies should commit
 financial resources toward the open source projects that they
 deploy”* such as *“paying developers, security engineers, and other essential
 roles in supporting secure software development, vulnerability
 disclosure and handling processes, and vulnerability response
 for open source projects; and contributing funding and
 knowledge to centralized open source security projects.”*

The taxing of projects used by organizations should be designed
 so as not to disincentivize the ethos that the open source
 community was built on, which was one of collaboration,
 experimentation, and group innovation. Taxing the open source
 community to secure it if done, should be done in a way that
 doesn’t disincentivize usage and collaboration with open source
 software and regulation may do just that.

## How Endor Labs Supports Safe OSS Adoption

Endor Labs helps teams scale by giving them the context they
 need to make more informed risk management decisions. Endor Labs
 performs static analysis of code to help our users understand
 which package versions are actually used and which are not by
 your application. When an application uses a software
 dependency, typically that software dependency relies on others
 transitively. Transitive dependencies are often never used and
 even those dependencies directly imported by your application
 may be unused over time due to frequent refactoring of
 code. This problem varies by software language and
 ecosystem. Organizations should put a focus on removing
 unnecessary dependencies from their application code. By
 narrowing the graph of dependencies, promoting dependency reuse
 and removing unnecessary dependencies, organizations can further
 scale vulnerability management as well as improve their
 application quality. Endor Labs further uses this static
 analysis to identify areas where changes between versions of
 packages may impact applications by detecting conflicting
 dependencies. This helps teams prioritize remediation efforts by
 the effort to fix an application. Context also helps in
 prioritizing remediation efforts. By ensuring that remediation
 efforts can be focused on areas where they are actually using
 vulnerable code, organizations improve the impact and reduce the
 cost of their remediation efforts over time. Industry can reduce
 the economic cost of security as well as decrease defender
 burnout rates and help to reduce the skill gap in our industry
 by focusing on improving context to optimize for impact over
 output.

‍

At Endor Labs we help organizations take an approach we believe
 to be more practical and aligned with the ethos of open source.
 Organizations need a strategy for how they manage their software
 supply chain to help them manage critical incidents like Log4j.
 If a software dependency is unmaintained and transitively relies
 on log4j, your organization needs a plan for how to update that
 package version. Too often that answer is, “wait for someone
 else to fix it”. Organizations should take conscious action with
 open source packages and with conscious action there can be
 three choices:

- Accept the risk
- Switch to a different package as your software dependency
- Maintain that dependency yourself and contribute back to the
 community by accepting the cost of maintenance as a cost of
 doing business.

We help organizations to identify unmaintained software so they
 can make more informed risk management decisions on how to
 approach managing open source. By helping organizations select
 higher quality software dependencies, giving them visibility
 into unmaintained software packages and helping organizations to
 narrow their dependency graph Endor Labs helps your teams make
 better choices around open source package selection and
 maintenance.

## Our Final Thoughts

As the industry deals with the shellshock (no pun intended) of
 the log4j incident we’re reminded how much further the
 cybersecurity industry has to go to meet the dual goals of
 managing national security and risk along with doing so in a
 cost effective manner. We’re reminded painfully that our
 industry still has significant room to mature and that as we
 mature, the problems we face will change. As proprietors of
 developer productivity and cybersecurity, we’re ready to partner
 with the community to solve these problems. Only through
 partnership with communities can we truly make critical incident
 response, scalable, cost effective and timely.

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### What's next?

When you're ready to take the next step in securing your
 software supply chain, here are 3 ways Endor Labs can help:

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## Contents

[Contextually Aware Vulnerability Management Practices](#contextually-aware-vulnerability-management-practices)

[How CISA and Industry Security Leaders Can Help](#how-cisa-and-industry-security-leaders-can-help)

[The Risks of Requiring Financial Commitments in OSS Projects](#the-risks-of-requiring-financial-commitments-in-oss-projects)

[How Endor Labs Supports Safe OSS Adoption](#how-endor-labs-supports-safe-oss-adoption)

[Our Final Thoughts](#our-final-thoughts)

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