Java Spring4Shell flaw exploit attempts: These are the industries most affected

April 7, 2022 TH Author

The sector most heavily impacted by the Spring4Shell Java flaw is technology, according to security firm Check Point.

Spring4Shell is a bug worth paying attention to and could be a software supply chain threat: Microsoft this week urged customers to patch the critical flaw in a widely-used framework for Java applications.

The flaws include CVE-2022-22947, which affected VMware’s Tanzu products, as well as CVE-2022-22963 and CVE-2022-22965, affecting Java applications.

Check Point said it continues to see exploit attempts against these vulnerabilities, and has data which suggests 16% organisations worldwide have seen attempts to exploits the flaws. Most of the targeted customers were based in Europe. In the first weekend of since the vulnerability was found, Check Point said it had seen around 37,000 attempts to allocate the Spring4Shell vulnerability.

“The most impacted industry is software vendor where 28% of the organization were impacted by the vulnerability,” it said. This was followed by education/research and insurance/legal.

“Organizations using Java Spring should immediately review their software and update to the latest versions by following the official Spring project guidance,” Check Point says.

Java is widely-used for building enterprise software applications. Microsoft advises customers using Windows 11 to monitor registry keys through mobile device management (MDM) policies to ensure that security settings have not been changed. It also recommends use the built-in Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) to mitigate kernel level attacks.

Microsoft said that it has “been tracking a low volume of exploit attempts across our cloud services” for these vulnerabilities.