The Never-Ending Log4j Patch Cycle of 2021
Description
This meme leverages the popular 'I am once again asking' format featuring US Senator Bernie Sanders. In the image, Sanders is shown outdoors in a winter coat, looking directly at the viewer with a sincere expression. The text overlay reads, 'I am once again asking you to fix a log4j vulnerability.' A 'Bernie' campaign logo is visible in the upper right, and an 'imgflip.com' watermark is in the bottom left. This meme perfectly captures the sentiment of the tech community in mid-December 2021 during the Log4Shell crisis. After the initial critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed, subsequent related vulnerabilities were discovered, requiring developers and SREs to apply multiple patches in rapid succession. The humor lies in the feeling of exhaustion and repetition, as if a weary project manager (or the CVE feed itself) is repeatedly returning with the same dreadful request. It deeply resonates with senior engineers who experienced the high-stress, all-hands-on-deck effort to mitigate a constantly evolving, widespread security threat
Comments
9Comment deleted
The product owner's Jira workflow for Log4j was just cloning the 'Patch Now' ticket and adding '-again' to the summary every 48 hours
If dependency resolution were democratic, that Log4j jar would have been filibustered into production long after the exploit POCs hit GitHub
The real vulnerability isn't in Log4j - it's in believing your dependency scanner caught all 47 transitive dependencies that somehow pulled in log4j-core-1.2.17 through a build plugin you forgot existed
Once again, because 'we patched Log4j' just means the scanner hasn't reached the shaded jar inside the vendor appliance nobody has root on
After the Log4Shell vulnerability dropped in December 2021, security teams everywhere became Bernie Sanders - perpetually asking developers to patch their dependencies while watching the same vulnerable Log4j versions persist across production systems like an eternal winter. The real vulnerability wasn't in the code; it was in our collective belief that 'we'll upgrade our dependencies next sprint.'
We excluded log4j-core in the pom, SBOM went green, and the pager still fired - turns out a vendor fat JAR shaded 2.14.1 three levels deep; our dependency “DAG” is actually a Matryoshka
Log4j: proving even logs can JNDI-dial home for RCE, turning every enterprise dep tree into a phonebook of doom
Every time we declare “no Log4j here”, Maven resolves 37 transitive deps and a shaded vendor fat jar reintroduces JNDI - security’s email has basically become a cron job for CVE-2021-44228
If I had a nickel for every time people opened a Github log4j issue on my Python projects, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. Comment deleted