RCE – Confluence (CVE-2024-21683) with public exploits on GitHub. Authentication is required. Both Confluence Data Center and Confluence Server are vulnerable. 🔻 Version 8.5.9 LTS, which fixes the vulnerability, was released on May 9. 🔻 On May 23, after the description of the vulnerability in NVD and the Atlassian ticket became public, researcher Huong Kieu studied the patch, described the vulnerability and reported that he was able to make a PoC. On the same day, exploits for this vulnerability appeared on GitHub.
Atlassian likely held back information about fixing this vulnerability so that more organizations could update before active exploitation began. However, they didn’t quite succeed. Apparently they accidentally published the ticket on May 15th, and then hid it until May 23rd. But the vulnerability search engine Vulners remembered it. 😉 So information about the vulnerability was available all this time.
Joint Advisory AA22-279A and Vulristics. Hello everyone! This episode will be about the new hot twenty vulnerabilities from CISA, NSA and FBI, Joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) AA22-279A, and how I analyzed these vulnerabilities using my open source project Vulristics.
Americans can’t just release a list of “20 vulnerabilities most commonly exploited in attacks on American organizations.” They like to add geopolitics and point the finger at some country. Therefore, I leave the attack attribution mentioned in the advisory title without comment.
Vulnerability Management news and publications #2. Hello everyone! This is the second episode of Vulnerability Management news and publications. In fact, this is a collection of my posts from the avleonovcom and avleonovrus telegram channels. Therefore, if you want to read them earlier, subscribe to these channels.
The main idea of this episode. Microsoft is a biased company. In fact, they should now be perceived as another US agency. Does this mean that we need to forget about Microsoft and stop tracking what they do? No, it doesn’t. They do a lot of interesting things that can at least be researched and copied. Does this mean that we need to stop using Microsoft products? In some locations (you know which ones) for sure, in some we can continue to use such products if it is reasonable, but it’s necessary to have a plan B. And this does not only apply to Microsoft. So, it’s time for a flexible approaches. Here we do it this way, there we do it differently. It seems that rather severe fragmentation of the IT market is a long-term trend and it’s necessary to adapt to it.
Vulnerability Management news and publications #1. Hello everyone! In this episode, I will try to revive Security News with a focus on Vulnerability Management.
On the one hand, creating such reviews requires free time, which could be spent more wisely, for example, on open source projects or original research. On the other hand, there are arguments in favor of news reviews. Keeping track of the news is part of our job as vulnerability and security specialists. And preferably not only headlines.
I usually follow the news using my automated telegram channel @avleonovnews. And it looks like this: I see something interesting in the channel, I copy it to Saved Messages so that I can read it later. Do I read it later? Well, usually not. Therefore, the creation of news reviews motivates to read and clear Saved Messages. Just like doing Microsoft Patch Tuesday reviews motivates me to watch what’s going on there. In general, it seems it makes sense to make a new attempt. Share in the comments what you think about it. Well, if you want to participate in the selection of news, I will be glad too.
I took 10 news items from Saved Messages and divided them into 5 categories:
Last Week’s Security news: Serious Sam in Metasploit, PetitPotam, Zimbra Hijack, Joint Advisory TOP30 CVEs. Hello everyone! Last Week’s Security News, July 26 – August 1.
Serious Sam in Metasploit
Last week I talked about the Serious Sam vulnerability (CVE-2021-36934), also known as HiveNightmare. The name HiveNightmare comes from the fact that Windows stores its registry data in a small number of proprietary database files called hives. Due to mismanagement of SAM and SYSTEM hives in Windows 10, it is possible for an unprivileged user to read those files and then, for example, extract the account password hashes. An exploit for this vulnerability is now available in Metasploit and it will be much easier for attackers to exploit this vulnerability. The issues is still under investigation by Microsoft and a patch is not currently available, only the list of vulnerable OS versions, however a workaround has been provided.
PetitPotam
At the beginning of last week, PetitPotam (Little Hippo) attack made a lot of noise. It could force remote Windows systems to reveal password hashes that could then be easily cracked.
“The PetitPotam bug is tied to the Windows operating system and the abuse of a remote access protocol called Encrypting File System Remote Protocol (MS-EFSRPC). The protocol is designed to allow Windows systems to access remote encrypted data stores, allowing for management of the data while enforcing access control policies. […] The PetitPotam PoC is a form of manipulator-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against Microsoft’s NTLM authentication system. Next, an attacker uses the file-sharing protocol Server Message Block (SMB) to request access to a remote system’s MS-EFSRPC interface. According to [security researcher Gilles Lionel], this forces the targeted computer to initiate an authentication procedure and share its authentication details via NTLM.
In response to the public availability of the PoC, Microsoft was quick to respond, outlining several mitigation options. For starters, Microsoft recommends disabling NTLM authentication on Windows domain controllers. It also suggests enabling the Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) feature on AD CS services.”
But there won’t be any special fix. Microsoft: “PetitPotam is a classic NTLM Relay Attack, and such attacks have been previously documented by Microsoft along with numerous mitigation options to protect customers.”
Sending tables from Atlassian Confluence to Splunk. Sometimes when we make automated analysis with Splunk, it might be necessary to use information that was entered or edited manually. For example, the classification of network hosts: do they belong to the PCI-DSS Scope or another group critical hosts or not.
In this case, Confluence can be quite a convenient tool for maintaining such a registry. Page with a table can be created very quickly and multiple employees can immediately start working with it.
Let’s see how to convert such table, export it to Splunk and use it with other data.
Confluence REST API for reading and updating wiki pages. In previous posts I wrote how to automate the work with Atlassian Jira, including automated ticket labeling. Now let’s try to use REST API of another popular Atlassian product – Confluence wiki engine.
What you may want to automate in Confluence? Obviously, it may be useful to read the pages that your colleagues regularly update and then use this data in some scripts as an input. You may also want to update your own Confluence pages, for example to post Vulnerability Scanning results. 😉
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