Exploit Attempts Underway for Apache Commons Text4Shell Vulnerability

The Text4Shell vulnerability, tracked under CVE-2022-42889, started drawing potentially malicious activity this week.

Researchers at Wordfence issued a threat advisory urging security teams to update their Apache Commons Text library to the patched version 1.10.0. The team began monitoring Text4Shell, which has been given a CVSS score of 9.8, on Oct. 17, and by Oct. 18 they started seeing attempts to exploit it.

While the threat does have many similarities to last year’s Apache Log4j library bug, Wordfence security researchers say Text4Shell poses less of a threat.

“While the vulnerability itself is similar to last year’s vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in Apache’s log4j library, the Apache Commons Text library is far less widely used in an unsafe manner and the likelihood of successful exploitation is significantly lower,” the team explained in their latest advisory.