Atlassian is advising its users of its Confluence Data Center and Server of a new critical security vulnerability that could result in significant data loss when exploited. The vulnerability, designated CVE-2023-22518, is vaguely described by Atlassian as an improper authorization vulnerability.
Atlassian indicated that the flaw does not impact the confidentiality of data residing on the servers but provided no other details regarding the vulnerability, likely to prevent threat actors from exploiting it.
The company is urging users to update affected devices to patched versions as soon as possible.
Source: The Hacker News
Analysis
Atlassian’s Confluence Server allows organizations to create, collaborate, and organize work, projects, and documents. As a result, these servers contain valuable information on an organization’s intellectual property and other sensitive information, making it a high-value target for espionage-motivated threat actors.
Based on the information Atlassian released, it would appear this vulnerability only allows threat actors to delete or otherwise make the data residing on vulnerable servers inaccessible to their rightful users. Although this vulnerability is still a risk, it would be worse if actors were able to exfiltrate information to then extort the victim into paying the threat actor not to publicly release the data that was obtained.
Mitigation
Field Effect’s elite team of Security Intelligence professionals constantly monitor the cyber threat landscape for vulnerabilities discovered in software such as Confluence. This research contributes to the timely deployment of signatures into Covalence to detect and mitigate the exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Covalence users are automatically notified when vulnerable software and devices are detected in their environment and are encouraged to review these AROs as quickly as possible.
Field Effect strongly encourages users of the affected Confluence servers to update to the latest version as soon as possible.
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