Cato Protects Against Atlassian Confluence Server Exploits (CVE-2023-22515)

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A new critical vulnerability has been disclosed by Atlassian in a security advisory published on October 4th 2023 in its on-premise Confluence Data Center and Server product. A privilege escalation vulnerability through which attackers may exploit a vulnerable endpoint in internet-facing Confluence instances to create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and gain access to the Confluence instance.

At the time of writing a CVSS score was not assigned to the vulnerability but it can be expected to be very high (9 – 10) due to the fact it is remotely exploitable and allows full access to the server once exploited.

Rapid CVE Mitigation by Cato Security Research

Cato’s Response  

There are no publicly known proofs-of-concept (POC) of the exploit available, but it has been confirmed by Atlassian that they have been made aware of the exploit by a “handful of customers where external attackers may have exploited a previously unknown vulnerability” so it can be assumed with a high certainty that it is already being exploited.

Cato’s Research Labs identified possible exploitation attempts of the vulnerable endpoint (“/setup/”) in some of our customers immediately after the security advisory was released, which were successfully blocked without any user intervention needed. The attempts were blocked by our IPS signatures aimed at identifying and blocking URL scanners even before a signature specific to this CVE was available.

The speed with which using the very little information available from the advisory was already integrated into online scanners gives a strong indication of how much of a high-value target Confluence servers are, and is concerning given the large numbers of publicly facing Confluence servers that exist.

Following the disclosure, Cato deployed signatures blocking any attempts to interact with the vulnerable “/setup/” endpoint, with a detect-to-protect time of 1 day and 23 hours for all users and sites connected to Cato worldwide, and Opt-In Protection already available in under 24 hours.

Furthermore, Cato’s recommendation is to restrict access to Confluence servers’ administration endpoints only from authorized IPs, preferably from within the network and when not possible that it is only accessible from hosts protected by Cato, whether behind a Cato Socket or remote users running the Cato Client.

Cato’s Research Labs continues to monitor the CVE for additional information, and we will update our signatures as more information becomes available or a POC is made public and exposes additional information. Follow our CVE Mitigation page and Release Notes for future information.