The British and US governments have issued alerts to businesses as several hacking groups may exploit a weak spot to break into computer networks, with Minecraft the first victim of the attacks.
Hackers were able to execute commands on the computers of other players of the Microsoft owned Minecraft, with the company stating it has patched the issue and that gamers would be protected from this point onwards.
“Cryptojacking” was another popular choice of attack, with hackers hijacking other computers to use their processing power to mine cryptocurrency.
Log4j, the soft spot in the network, is an open-source Apache Software Foundation project tool that is used in nearly all software products and cloud services.
The reason a lot of companies could be affected by this is that software is very rarely created from scratch for each business, with a shared library of open-source code used by organisations and maintained and distributed by charities.
Essentially, a lot of the information organisations store on cloud services and such is built on the same software.
Apache says the issue, which a fix has already been published for, will not affect personal devices, but any data an individual has with an organisation that operates web servers could be at risk.
Lotem Finkelstein, director of threat intelligence for Check Point Software Technologies said, “I cannot overstate the seriousness of this threat.”
“Security teams need to jump on this with the utmost urgency as the potential for damage is incalculable.”