Dodging a Zero-Day Vulnerability with 'Bad' Practices
Description
This meme is a screenshot of a tweet featuring the 'Michael Scott and Ed Truck shaking hands' meme from the TV show The Office. In the image, the boss, Ed Truck, is labeled 'Boss appreciating me for making a secure app.' He is shaking hands with an awkward-looking Michael Scott, who is labeled, 'Me using System.out.print() instead of log4j everywhere.' The tweet's caption reads, 'It be like that sometimes,' and is dated December 12, 2021. The humor is deeply contextual and timely. It was posted just days after the discovery of the Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) vulnerability, a critical zero-day exploit in the popular Java logging library, Log4j. The joke is that the developer's use of a basic, generally discouraged practice (`System.out.println`) instead of the industry-standard logging framework inadvertently saved the application from a catastrophic security flaw. The developer is being praised for security that was achieved not through diligence, but through a lazy or suboptimal coding choice, hence the awkward expression
Comments
8Comment deleted
Some call it a critical vulnerability, I call it a compelling event to finally remove all the `System.out.println` statements that have been in the codebase since 2015
We mitigated Log4Shell by switching to System.out.println and calling it a “vendor-free observability pipeline” - instant CVE reduction, permanent post-mortem amnesia
The only time in history where using System.out.println() in production actually improved your security posture - proving that sometimes the worst practices become best practices when the entire logging ecosystem catches fire
Turns out the most effective Log4Shell mitigation wasn't a WAF rule - it was the intern who never learned what a logging framework is
Ah yes, the classic 'security through println' approach - because nothing says 'enterprise-grade logging' quite like stdout littered with debug statements that'll vanish the moment you close the terminal. Management celebrates your 'secure app' while you're one server restart away from losing all diagnostic capability. It's the perfect crime: they think you've implemented robust security monitoring, but you've actually just created a production debugging nightmare that would make any SRE weep. Bonus points if those System.out.print() calls are still checking in sensitive data that's now permanently etched into whatever log aggregation system is scraping stdout
We closed CVE-2021-44228 by ripping out log4j; now incident response is sshing into prod and grepping for println, which management calls a security win because the scanner stopped yelling
Log4Shell? Nah, my logger's too dumb for RCE - println can't even phone home
When AppSec’s KPI is “vulnerable JAR count,” stdout suddenly becomes the logging platform - and finance calls it observability cost optimization