CISO Finally Gets Rid of Log4j Nightmares After Two Years of Therapy

SAN FRANCISCO — Marcus Weatherby, Chief Information Security Officer at multinational logistics firm GlobalFreight Solutions, announced today that he has successfully completed a 24-month therapeutic program specifically designed to help him forget the words "Log4Shell" and "CVE-2021-44228."

The vulnerability, which affected the ubiquitous Apache Log4j logging library in December 2021, sent Weatherby and his team of 47 engineers into a 72-hour continuous remediation sprint across 14,000 servers, 3,200 applications, and what Weatherby describes as "an absolutely cursed number of embedded systems that nobody even knew were running Java."

"I couldn't close my eyes without seeing nested JSON payloads," Weatherby told reporters during a press conference held at his therapist's office in Palo Alto. "I'd wake up in cold sweats screaming 'CHECK THE MINECRAFT SERVERS!' My wife found me at 3 AM trying to patch our smart refrigerator."

Dr. Patricia Venkatesan, Weatherby's cognitive behavioral therapist and author of "When Dependencies Attack: Treating Tech-Related PTSD," confirmed that his case was one of the most severe she'd encountered. "Marcus would have full panic attacks whenever someone mentioned the words 'supply chain' or 'transitive dependency.' We had to take baby steps. First, we got him comfortable with hearing the letter 'j' again. Then we worked our way up to the full word 'Java.'"

The remediation effort cost GlobalFreight an estimated $4.7 million in overtime, emergency vendor contracts, and what CFO Linda Ramirez called "a truly unholy amount of Red Bull and breakfast burritos." Three engineers reportedly quit mid-crisis to become woodworkers.

Now fully recovered, Weatherby has compiled a list of advice for future CISOs:

1. "Maintain a 'Supply Chain Doomsday Bunker' with at least six months of coffee, granola bars, and an offline copy of every GitHub repository your company has ever used."

2. "Establish a firm policy that any developer who says 'it's just a small dependency' must personally sign a blood oath accepting full responsibility."

3. "Keep a therapist on retainer. Not for after the incident. Before. You'll know when you need them."

4. "If a vulnerability gets its own logo and Twitter hashtag within the first hour, just start your vacation immediately. You've already lost."

When asked if he felt prepared for the next zero-day crisis, Weatherby paused thoughtfully before responding: "I've preemptively blocked all CVE notification emails and hired someone to screen my Slack messages. I'm as ready as I'll ever be, which is to say, not at all."

At press time, Weatherby's phone began buzzing with alerts about a new critical vulnerability in OpenSSL.