Confluence exploit - recovery tips

Brian Hill April 17, 2019

We've been busy as a team working through support efforts for instances affected by recent exploits arising from Confluence vulnerabilities published at:

  1. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2019-04-17-968660855.html
  2. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2019-03-20-966660264.html

There's been some pretty busy community posts arising from these as sys-admin teams work to secure and upgrade affected systems, including:

  1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/khugepageds-eating-all-of-the-CPU/td-p/1055337
  2. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/WARNING-Confluence-server-hacked/qaq-p/1054136
  3. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-come-my-confluence-installation-was-hacked-by-Kerberods/qaq-p/1054605

One of our team, @Jeff Turner took the time to write a detailed advisory note on the steps you should be taking to secure a compromised system whilst balancing the need to gather evidence of the exploit and minimising service disruption.

In Australia, that means also considering the notification criteria published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the threshold for Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, which is a legal obligation locally.

By communicating with Cyber response agencies in your respective country, you're helping to make co-ordinating agencies aware of the issue to minimise damage and shorten the recovery window.

If you're not yet using the Atlassian Incident Management Playbook, now would be a very good time to start.

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Brian Hill April 25, 2019

(pasting in response from Jeff on another post)

According to this alertlogic.com blog, this vulnerability is also being exploited to launch ransomware.

Dusty Brossart May 14, 2019

I'm pretty sure this just happened to us yesterday. We had a zero-day ransomware spider to a few of our servers. We ended up pin-pointing it back to our Confluence server. 

Funny thing is, we already had the workaround implemented for our instance. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2019-04-17-968660855.html

Any one else experiencing this?

Brian Hill May 14, 2019

Haven't seen anything further, but have you alerted Atlassian security of its existence despite applying the workaround?

Dusty Brossart June 3, 2019

Yep, sure did. Turned out it was for an exploit that we were never informed of. They apparently had issues notifying their tech emails, so we were left in the dark. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2019-03-20-966660264.html 

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