Daniel Lydon and Conor Quinn contributed attacker behavior insights to this blog.
As of November 5, 2023, Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is observing exploitation of Atlassian Confluence in multiple customer environments, including for ransomware deployment. We have confirmed that at least some of the exploits are targeting CVE-2023-22518, an improper authorization vulnerability affecting Confluence Data Center and Confluence Server. Atlassian published an advisory for the vulnerability on October 31, 2023. MDR has also observed attempts to exploit CVE-2023-22515, a critical broken access control vulnerability in Confluence that came to light on October 4.
Atlassian updated their advisory for CVE-2023-22518 on November 3 to note that exploitation of the vulnerability had been reported to them by a customer.
Observed attacker behavior
Beginning November 5, 2023, Rapid7 MDR began responding to exploitation of Confluence Server within various customer environments. The alerts we observed occurred between 2023-11-05 10:08:34 and 23:05:35 UTC.
The process execution chain, for the most part, is consistent across multiple environments, indicating possible mass exploitation of vulnerable internet-facing Atlassian Confluence servers.
Rapid7 observed POST requests in HTTP access logs (/atlassian/confluence/logs) on both Windows and Linux. The requests were sent to /json/setup-restore.action?synchronous=true, as seen in the example below:
[05/Nov/2023:11:54:54 +0000] - SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 POST /json/setup-restore.action?synchronous=true HTTP/1.1 302 44913ms - - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36
[05/Nov/2023:11:56:09 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 GET /rest/plugins/1.0/?os_authType=basic HTTP/1.1 200 153ms 388712 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.5938.132 Safari/537.36
[05/Nov/2023:11:56:10 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 DELETE / ..
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