Atlassian fixes critical vulnerability in development collaboration products

The vulnerability affects Atlassian Confluence, a wiki-like collaboration platform for software development teams; Bamboo, a software build and testing platform; FishEye, a code-tracking system for centralizing different repositories; and Crucible, a collaborative peer code review framework.

Attackers can exploit the vulnerability to execute arbitrary Java code on systems that use the affected frameworks, as long as they can access their Web interfaces, the company said in security advisories published Wednesday. To exploit Confluence, the attacker also needs to have access to an account on the platform.

The impact of the vulnerability depends on what data is stored on those systems and what the malicious Java code is designed to do.

Atlassian released patches for all of the affected products. Confluence users are advised to apply the webwork-2.1.5-atlassian-3.jar patch, Bamboo users should apply the freemarker-2.3.16-atlassian-34.jar patch, while FishEye and Crucible users should upgrade to the newly released 3.5.5 or 3.6.2 versions.

If the affected products are not directly accessible from the Internet or other untrusted networks, the risk of compromise is reduced because the attacker would first have to gain access to the same network as the servers hosting them. Companies whose installations need to be accessible from the Internet can block requests in their firewalls that match specific regular expressions released by Atlassian.

Atlassian has over 35,000 customers worldwide, including large Internet and software development companies like Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, eBay, LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, Adobe Systems, Microsoft and Cisco Systems.