As much as this may seem like parody or satire, it isn’t.
An exploit found in Minecraft was discovered to allow those with malicious intent to hack into internet systems around the world. Basically, anything running Apache code (and that’s nearly everything online) is vulnerable. And by vulnerable, we mean “wide open” to hackers wanting to gain total access. Big corporations are quickly working to close the unintentional opening, but smaller companies and third parties that are connected to corporations may have a harder time. That means the internet “is on fire.”
“The internet’s on fire right now,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. “People are scrambling to patch,” he said, “and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.” He said Friday morning that in the 12 hours since the bug’s existence was disclosed that it had been “fully weaponized,” meaning malefactors had developed and distributed tools to exploit it. — Associated Press
The hack is being called “Log4Shell”. An updating log of the world’s knowledge and response to this vulnerability is available on LunaSec. One of the biggest threats faced from this opening is that third-parties, including malevolent nations, can embed spyware and other hidden operations into the systems of nearly everyone on the planet using Google, Apple, Netflix, etc. This is a huge mess.
‘I would be hard-pressed to think of a company that´s not at risk,’ said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. — Daily Mail
There’s a reason the nuclear codes for the United States are kept on floppy disks even to this day. Hopefully breaches into systems that secure and dangerous will be minimized for all countries. It may be weeks, months, years, and even decades for us to know just how much damage is being done by a little flaw found in Minecraft…
Is this what sent Amazon’s worldwide server system spiraling downward a few days ago? Hmm…
