Google's analysis provides a sobering look at why this log4j vulnerability is so difficult to identify and eradicate from a digital ecosystem. This material is directly related to a long standing question in the SBOM community: How Deep should you go in listing the components of an SBOM and reporting on related vulnerabilities, at the component level.

"the vulnerability is more than one level deep, with a majority affected five levels down"

It remains an open question. Hopefully the log4j "lessons learned" will help inform the discussion and reach a community consensus.

Another area, ripe for improvement is a standard, programmatic method to report software vulnerabilities at an SBOM component level to replace the existing manual method used by many vendors today, which are designed for human consumption. An automated, standard vulnerability reporting method at the SBOM component level with standard Fix Status semantics will greatly improve software consumer efficiency and eliminate the manual intervention that is commonplace today. An open-source, free to use SBOM based Vulnerability Disclosure Report format is available online for all software vendors to use for automated, programmatic vulnerability processing by consumers.