EXTRAORDINARY: The whole world is in danger, hackers can exploit a serious bug in ubiquitous software – Fonts

Hackers are exploiting a particularly serious vulnerability discovered in software used by millions of servers, as well as large organizations and companies around the world, the AP agency reported on Saturday.

“It would be hard for me to think of a company that is not in danger,” said Joe Sullivan, a spokesman for Cloudflare, a cyber security company. According to experts, the full extent of the damage will not be known for several days.

According to a representative of the American company CrowdStrike, which also deals with cyber security, on Friday morning, hackers managed to develop their own software and tools that exploit it in the 12 hours since the vulnerability was announced.

According to the head of the security company Tenable, it is even about “The biggest, most serious (software) vulnerability in the last decade,” perhaps even the largest in the history of modern computing.

The bug was named Log4Shell and was discovered in Apache software, which is found on servers around the world and, according to experts, is used by, among others, large industrial companies, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, as well as government institutions.

The bug gives criminals, spies, but also novice hackers access to internal networks where they can easily steal or erase valuable data or save a virus.

The public learned of the problem on Thursday, but the Apache Software Foundation knew about it on November 24 – the repair then took two weeks. Businesses and institutions that use the software will be protected from hackers after they download and install the update.

While large organizations like Amazon should be able to fix their servers fairly quickly, problematic software is part of many other programs that only their developers can update, the AP notes.

Cybersecurity companies recommend that companies and institutions assume that they are at risk and act and install the update as soon as possible.