Atlassian is being actively exploited to compromise corporate networks

Zero-day attack
(Image credit: Shutterstock) (Image credit: Shutterstock.com)

Two widely-used Atlassian Bitbucket tools - Server and Data Center, carry a high severity flaw that allows remote attackers with read permissions to a public or private Bitbucket repository to execute arbitrary code, experts have warned. 

The flaw is being actively used in the wild, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has noted, urging companies that use the tools to patch their endpoints immediately. Internet traffic analysts GreyNoise confirmed CISA’s findings, saying it had found evidence of the flaw being exploited.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2022-36804, and was present in version 7.0.0 of both tools all the way up to version 8.3.0. Companies that are unable to apply the patch immediately should turn off public repositories to minimize the risk, Atlassian said.

Summer patching

The company confirmed the flaw’s existence in late August 2022, but this is not the first time this year that Atlassian had to patch major software flaws. 

Last summer, several of its popular products, including Jira, Confluence, and Bamboo were found to be carrying two high-severity vulnerabilities that allowed for remote code execution and privilege escalation.

The first vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-26136, an arbitrary Servlet Filter bypass, allowing threat actors to bypass custom Servlet Filters that third-party apps use for authentication. All they’d need to do is send a custom, malicious HTTP request.

The second vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-26137, and is described as a cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) bypass.

"Sending a specially crafted HTTP request can invoke the Servlet Filter used to respond to CORS requests, resulting in a CORS bypass,” Atlassian said. “An attacker that can trick a user into requesting a malicious URL can access the vulnerable application with the victim's permissions."

While these two flaws were found in a handful of Atlassian products, there was one more, found only in Confluence. The CVE-2022-26138 flaw is, in fact, a hard-coded password, set up to help cloud migrations. 

The flaws have since been patched.

Via: The Register

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.