Recently discovered cybersecurity vulnerability in Apache Struts, which potentially allows hackers to access sensitive corporate data. Struts is an open source software framework used by many thousands of corporations worldwide to create Java web applications. Mike Pittenger is a security expert from Black Duck Software commented below.
Mike Pittenger, Security Expert at Black Duck Software:
“Once again, we see the importance of having full visibility to all of the components used in your software. While neither Tenable nor Rapid7 appear to have plug-ins for detecting this yet, they undoubtedly will. But then organizations are forced to scan their entire environment, using the plug-in to identify vulnerable versions of Struts. This can take days, as it did for many organizations when Heartbleed was disclosed. Worse yet, this fire drill happens with every new critical vulnerability, because the vulnerability assessment tools have no persistent knowledge of the applications we build and the components used. Also, these tools only have plug-ins for a handful of the vulnerabilities reported in open source components each year. Companies that rely solely on these tools are blind to the thousands of vulnerabilities in open source each year for which plug-ins aren’t built.”
“The automotive industry solved this problem over 100 years ago by maintaining a bill-of-materials for all parts used in a car. Doing the same with software – maintaining an accurate list of all components used in each application – makes incident response much easier when vulnerabilities like this are disclosed.”
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