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Latest Critical Atlassian Confluence Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation

criticalVulnerability exploited in the wildimportance 60CVE-2022-26138

Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →

CVEVulnerabilityCVSSEPSSFlagsAffectedExposurePublished
CVE-2022-26138
Hard-coded Credentials in Atlassian Questions for Confluence App

The Questions for Confluence app for Confluence Server and Data Center, when versions 2.7.34, 2.7.35, or 3.0.2 are installed, creates a user account named disabledsystemuser in the confluence-users group protected by a hard-coded password (CWE-798). Because the credential is embedded in the app, any remote, unauthenticated attacker who knows the password can log in to Confluence without a valid account. Successful exploitation grants access to all content that is accessible to the confluence-users group, which typically spans most of the instance's spaces and pages. Only Confluence Server and Data Center deployments that installed one of those app versions are affected, and the created account persists after installation. The flaw is being actively exploited: it was added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-07-29 and carries a 98.2% EPSS score (100th percentile).

Do: Upgrade the Questions for Confluence app to a fixed release per Atlassian's instructions, as required by the CISA KEV catalog. Check whether an account named disabledsystemuser exists in the confluence-users group; if present, delete it or change its hard-coded password, and review authentication logs for logins using that account. Prioritize internet-exposed Confluence Server and Data Center instances.

9.898% KEV
  • Atlassian Questions for Confluence app for Confluence Server and Data Center 2.7.34, 2.7.35, and 3.0.2 (the disabledsystemuser account is created when these versions are installed and persists afterward)
moderatelikely thousands of Confluence Server/Data Center instances (only those that installed the three named app versions)
Full article277 words · extracted from thehackernews.com · click to collapse

Ravie LakshmananJul 29, 2022

A week after Atlassian rolled out patches to contain a critical flaw in its Questions For Confluence app for Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center, the shortcoming has now come under active exploitation in the wild.

The bug in question is CVE-2022-26138, which concerns the use of a hard-coded password in the app that could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to gain unrestricted access to all pages in Confluence.

The real-world exploitation follows the release of the hard-coded credentials on Twitter, prompting the Australian software company to prioritize patches to mitigate potential threats targeting the flaw.

"Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long [...] to observe exploitation once the hard-coded credentials were released, given the high value of Confluence for attackers who often jump on Confluence vulnerabilities to execute ransomware attacks," Rapid7 security researcher Glenn Thorpe said.

It's worth noting that the bug only exists when the Questions for Confluence app is enabled. That said, uninstalling the Questions for Confluence app does not remediate the flaw, as the created account does not get automatically removed after the app has been uninstalled.

Users of the affected product are advised to update their on-premise instances to the latest versions (2.7.38 and 3.0.5) as soon as possible, or take steps to disable/delete the account.

The development also arrives as Palo Alto Networks, in its 2022 Unit 42 Incident Response Report, found that threat actors are scanning for vulnerable endpoints within 15 minutes of public disclosure of a new security flaw.

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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/latest-critical-atlassian-confluence.html