Atlassian is urging enterprise administrators to update their on-premises Confluence Data Center and Server installations quickly to plug a critical security vulnerability (CVE-2023-22518) that could lead to “significant data loss if exploited by an unauthenticated attacker.”
About CVE-2023-22518
CVE-2023-22518 has been categorized as an improper authorization vulnerability, but no other details have been shared by the Australian software maker.
It affects all versions of Confluence Data Center and Server before versions 7.19.16, 8.3.4, 8.4.4, 8.5.3 and 8.6.1.
“Versions outside of the support window (i.e. versions that have reached End of Life) may also be affected, so Atlassian recommends you upgrade to a fixed LTS version or later,” the company said.
“Atlassian Cloud sites 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.”
Even though “there are no reports of active exploitation at this time”, Atlassian says that all publicly accessible on-prem instances should be upgraded immediately.
Admins that can’t patch at this time are advised to back up their instance and temporarility remove it from the internet.
“Instances accessible to the public internet, including those with user authentication, should be restricted from external network access until you can patch,” the company added.
Vulnerable Atlassian Confluence instances are often targeted by attackers
Atlassian pushed out critical patches for Confluence Data Center and Server earlier this month, when it fixed CVE-2023-22515, a broken access control zero-day flaw that was being exploited by a state-backed threat actor.
0-day and n-day vulnerabilities in Confluence Data Center and Server are regularly taken advantage of by a variety of attackers.