Definition

MITRE’s description of CWE-778: When a security-critical event occurs, the product either does not record the event or omits important details about the event when logging it.

Common consequences MITRE lists

  • Non-Repudiation: Hide Activities

Why it matters

Without the right events attacks go unnoticed and responders cannot tell what happened, which prolongs breaches and blocks recovery.

How to prevent it

  • Decide which events matter, such as authentication, authorization failures, administrative actions and data exports, and record who, what, when and the outcome.
  • Send logs to a protected central store and alert on the patterns that matter.
  • Test that each required event is actually emitted.

Guides on this site

Main subject · Guide

Create security logs someone can investigate

Record meaningful decisions with consistent structure, protect the resulting evidence, and prove that important events reach an operational owner.

Also covers this · Guide

Turn runtime events into a tested investigation and containment path

Collect evidence that answers a concrete security question and rehearse the response without destroying the facts needed to investigate.

Cites this weakness · Guide

Apply a security baseline across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

Give workloads platform identities instead of keys, guard the instance metadata endpoint, block public storage, keep audit logs past the default retention, close inbound admin ports and use the native secret store, with tested Terraform for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Cites this weakness · Guide

Detect container and host threats at runtime with eBPF sensors and cloud services

Watch process, file and network activity inside containers with an eBPF sensor or a managed cloud agent, write and test rules for the attacks you expect, tune them with narrow exceptions and contain a compromised pod without destroying evidence.

Cites this weakness · Case study

Case study: the Okta support-system breach and session tokens in HAR files (2023)

How a service account password saved to a personal browser profile let an attacker download customers' HAR files from Okta's support system, replay the session tokens inside them against five customers, and stay unseen for two weeks; and why HAR files are credentials, admin sessions need binding, and every exposed credential must be rotated.

Cites this weakness · Case study

Case study: certificate expiry outages at Ericsson (2018) and Microsoft Teams (2020), and Equifax's blind spot

How an expired certificate inside Ericsson's core-network software cut mobile data for millions in about 11 countries, how an expired authentication certificate took Microsoft Teams offline, how an expired inspection certificate left Equifax blind for 19 months, through its 2017 breach, and the inventory, automation and testing that prevent each.

Cites this weakness · Case study

Case study: Storm-0558 and the forged Microsoft tokens (2023)

How a stolen 2016 consumer signing key and a token validation gap let Storm-0558 read enterprise Exchange Online mail in 2023, and what the review board found about rotation, logging and culture.

References

  1. CWE-778 in the MITRE CWE list (version 4.20)
  2. OWASP Logging Cheat Sheet

List data from MITRE; the name, definition and consequences are from MITRE’s CWE 4.20 catalogue. A guide is listed as the main subject when the weakness is what the guide is about, and as covering it when a dedicated section or worked example addresses it.

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