News

Log4j Vulnerably To Wreak Havoc On The Internet For Years To Come

Because of how widespread Log4j is, experts estimate that it may take years to hunt down all vulnerable instances and patch them.

Published

5 years ago

December 17, 2021

David Morelo

log4j vulnerability to wreak havoc on the internet for years to come

As if one pandemic wasn’t enough, there’s now also a cyber-pandemic whose scale is increasing at an exponential rate. The cause of this digital pandemic is a zero-day vulnerability in Java-based logging utility called Log4j. This open-source software allows software developers to log data within their applications, and it has been widely used since its release in 2001.

The vulnerability was disclosed on December 9 by the Alibaba Cloud Security Team, which named it Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228). Two days later, cybersecurity company Tenable described it as “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade”.

Since then, the vulnerability has affected many major tech players, including Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Broadcom, Cisco, Docker, F-Secure, IBM, Juniper Networks, Oracle, Red Hat, Siemens, SolarWinds, Sophos, Ubiquiti, Zoho, and others.

“It’s ubiquitous” said Chris Eng, chief research officer at cybersecurity firm Veracode, in an interview for CNN Business. Even if you’re a developer who doesn’t use Log4j directly, you might still be running the vulnerable code because one of the open-source libraries you use depends on Log4j”.

In addition to affecting large swaths of the global IT infrastructure, the Log4Shell vulnerability is also extremely severe because it involves arbitrary code execution. In other words, it makes it possible for attackers to make the vulnerable system do anything they want.

That’s why the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), and Germany’s Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) have all called on organizations to take on immediate action and install the available fixes, which were released three days before the vulnerability was published.

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Still, attackers have already successfully exploited the vulnerability to steal sensitive data, extract system credentials, install backdoors, and run crypto miners. Some of the largest botnets in the world are now scanning for the vulnerability, and almost half of all corporate networks have already been probed.

Because of how widespread Log4j is, experts estimate that it may take years to hunt down all vulnerable instances and patch them. Until that happens, cybercriminals will be on a hunt as well, ready to exploit them.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

2 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.