Why Automation Matters : Dealing With Vulnerabilities

 

The recent Log4j issues have highlighted another win for automation, from a couple of different angles.

Which Servers Are vulnerable?

There are a couple of ways to determine this. I guess the most obvious is to scan the servers and see which ones ping for the vulnerability, but depending on your server real estate, this could take a long time.

An alternative is to manage your software centrally and track which servers have downloaded and installed vulnerable software. This was mentioned by a colleague in a meeting recently…

My team uses Artifactory as a central store for a lot of our base software, like:

  • Oracle Database and patches.
  • WebLogic and patches.
  • SQLcl
  • ORDS
  • Java
  • Tomcat

In addition the developers use Artifactory to store their build artifacts. Once the problem software is identified, you could use a tool like Artifactory to determine which servers contained vulnerable software. That would be kind-of handy…

This isn’t directly related to automation, as you could use a similar centralised software library for manual work, but if you are doing manual builds there’s more of a tendency to do one-off things that don’t follow the normal procedure, so you are more likely to get false negatives. If builds are automated, there is less chance you will “acquire” software from somewhere other than the central library.

Fixing Vulnerable Software

If you use CI/CD, it’s a much simpler job to swap in a new version of a library or package, retest your software and deploy it. If your automated testing has good coverage, it may be as simple as commit to your source control. The quick succession of Log4j releases we’ve seen recently would have very little impact on your teams.

If you are working with containers, the deployment process would involve a build of a new image, then replacing all containers with new ones based on the new image. Pretty simple stuff.

If you are working in a more traditional virtual machine or physical setup, then having automated patching and deployments would give you similar benefits, even though it may feel more clunky…

Conclusion

Whichever way you play it, the adoption of automation is going to improve your reaction time when things like this happen again in the future, and make no mistake they will happen again!

I wrote a series of posts about automation here.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.