A critical zero-day vulnerability has recently been discovered in the Confluence Data Center and Server.
The vulnerability, known as CVE-2023-22515 and scored a CVSS 10 out of 10, is a privilege escalation vulnerability that allows external attackers to exploit the system and create administrator accounts that can be used to access Confluence instances.
Atlassian, the company that produces Confluence, rates this vulnerability as 'critical' and has released patches for it. On-premise instances of Confluence on the public internet are at risk as this vulnerability is exploitable anonymously. Atlassian has stated that cloud-hosted versions of Confluence are not impacted, but it is unclear if they were vulnerable before the patch. Atlassian also has published an FAQ for this vulnerability.
We recommend immediately upgrading to the latest patched version, especially if you use an exposed or internet-facing Confluence instance. Since exploitation was observed before the advisory and patch were issued, organizations should audit user accounts and signs of compromise. As a standard practice, you should also restrict network access to any Confluence instance.
GreyNoise has published a tag monitoring for CVE-2023-22515 exploitation attempts.
If you’re curious about viewing scanning activity related to the “/setup/setupadministrator.action” web path, you can view that here; and if you’re curious about IPs that are searching for any ”setup*.action” web paths, you can view that here.
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