The year ended in fine style for many IT teams as 2021 came to a close. However, they were caught off guard just before the holiday season by an unpleasant surprise.

Hundreds of servers around the globe are susceptible to a vulnerability in Log4Shell, which requires urgent remediation. Consequently, the experts froze their leaves and returned to the scene to check the position of the band-aid after freezing their leaves.

In the wake of this vulnerability, many organizations are still working to gain peace of mind. The company wants to make sure that this vulnerability, which affects so many segments of today’s modern information technology infrastructure, is not lurking somewhere in its systems.

This is because it affects Java enterprise applications often used in small and medium-sized companies. Another surprise is just around the corner this holiday season when it comes to this vulnerability.

Among the challenges is finding the most appropriate place to apply a patch or repair the loophole to fix the problem. It is estimated that more than 35,000 Java packages, or 8% of all Java packages in the Maven Central repository, may have been affected by the Log4Shell problem. This is based on some calculations.

With the sheer volume of third-party code that modern IT systems rely upon today, even outside of Java, it is easy to imagine the kind of headaches that IT teams face in dealing with today’s complex IT systems. The problem is that we have too much to sort through to come up with a solution. If you do not see the problem, you can not fix it.

It is estimated that approximately 40% to 80% of the lines of code in software today come from third parties, such as libraries, components, and software development kits (SDKs) that are provided by third parties. Gartner’s research determined that by 2025, 45% of organizations around the world will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains. This is a threefold increase over what was seen in 2021, according to a report by Gartner, a company specializing in information security research.

The Need for More Automation and Visibility Must be Addressed

Currently, an industry has been built around cyberattacks. Currently, this industry has numerous specialists waiting on the Dark Web. These specialists can play specific roles in a ransomware attack, from crafting the phishing message to collecting the ransom in the case of a ransomware attack.

In a world where malicious actors have been developing such intricate supply chains and weaponizing malware as a tool for criminals, businesses should step up their game if they want to maintain a competitive edge in their software supply chains.

A tool that can improve automation within their IT systems as well as provide them with visibility into their IT systems is what they need to provide the level of service they currently provide. Essentially, this means that they will be able to find vulnerabilities in their software supply chain more easily, instead of manually searching for such vulnerabilities.

A software supply chain has so many parts that it can be quite intimidating. If we were to narrow it down to Java software specifically, here are some of the features to keep an eye out for:

• An application-level vulnerability assessment can be performed continuously without the need to obtain source code to assess visibility at the application level. A Java-specific CVE database is used to compare code against the CVE database that is run against Java.

• It is critical to ensure that false positives are avoided by monitoring code executed by the Java runtime (JVM) and building accurate results that are not detected by traditional tools.

• Performance transparency: By adding additional agents to the production system, we avoid performance degradation caused by overheads that are added to the machine. There should be a way to run a solution without any agents being involved.