Risk actors are actively exploiting a now-patched, important security flaw impacting the Atlassian Confluence Data Heart and Confluence Server to conduct illicit cryptocurrency mining on vulnerable situations.
“The assaults contain risk actors that make use of strategies such because the deployment of shell scripts and XMRig miners, concentrating on of SSH endpoints, killing competing crypto mining processes, and sustaining persistence through cron jobs,” Development Micro researcher Abdelrahman Esmail mentioned.
The security vulnerability exploited is CVE-2023-22527, a most severity bug in older variations of Atlassian Confluence Data Heart and Confluence Server that might enable unauthenticated attackers to realize distant code execution. It was addressed by the Australian software program firm in mid-January 2024.
Development Micro mentioned it noticed a excessive variety of exploitation makes an attempt in opposition to the flaw between mid-June and finish of July 2024 that leveraged it to drop the XMRig miner on unpatched hosts. At the least three completely different risk actors are mentioned to be behind the malicious exercise –
- Launching XMRig miner through an ELF file payload utilizing specifically crafted requests
- Utilizing a shell script that first terminates competing cryptojacking campaigns (e.g., Kinsing), deletes all current cron jobs, uninstalls cloud security instruments from Alibaba and Tencent, and gathers system info, earlier than establishing a brand new cron job that checks for command-and-control (C2) server connectivity each 5 minutes and launching the miner
“With its steady exploitation by risk actors, CVE-2023-22527 presents a big security threat to organizations worldwide,” Esmail mentioned.
“To reduce the dangers and threats related to this vulnerability, directors ought to replace their variations of Confluence Data Heart and Confluence Server to the newest obtainable variations as quickly as potential.”
