Atlassian issues advice on how to keep your IT service desk secure... after hundreds of portals found facing the internet amid virus lockdown
(2020/04/07)
- Reference: 1586243232
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/07/servicedesk_security_advisory/
- Source link:
As companies move their staff to remote working amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, some IT teams have made internal platforms, such as tech support desks, face the public internet.
The hope, presumably, is that this ensures employees can easily reach these services from their homes, allowing them to raise support tickets and the like. However, organizations are leaving themselves open to mischief or worse by miscreants, we're told, because the portals are not fully secured. Strangers on the internet can create new accounts, impersonate staff, submit requests for bogus work, potentially access sensitive information, such as payroll details and documentation, and so on.
Inti De Ceukelaire of bug-bounty platform Intigriti [1]claimed earlier this month hundreds of corporate service portals have been exposed to the internet, a 12 per cent increase since he scanned the internet for them last summer – an increase the COVID-19 crisis may have contributed to.
Atlassian finally unleashes free Jira tier – nearly six months late yet just in time for coronavirus crunch [2]READ MORE
"An increasing number of Atlassian Jira Service Desks have been misconfigured to be accessible for anyone to sign up," he said.
"In essence, this is nothing to worry about as service desks may have legitimate reasons to be public. However, a growing number of instances have been repurposed to serve as an internal service ticket portal, allowing attackers to impersonate employees and create legitimate internal requests.
"Verifying the legitimacy of these requests has proven to be far less convenient without offline verification channels: you can’t just walk up to your colleague and ask them about it.
As a proof of concept, De Ceukelaire targeted a set of corporate Atlassian service desk portals he found facing the internet. By simply guessing the URL of the target's service portal, for example:
yourcompanyname.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/user/login
He was able to create a new user account and view the now-public internal portal. That in itself would be bad enough for most companies, but it could then lead to far worse things should an attacker, now armed with a seemingly legitimate employee account, use it to then socially engineer their way into more sensitive systems and information.
De Ceukelaire said he wrote some code that went through a list of 10,000 popular domain names to check for vulnerable Atlassian portals. Of those 10,000, he found that 1,972 had Atlassian portals, and 288 of those, or around 15 per cent, allowed an outside user to create an account.
Keep in mind, this is just for Atlassian Jira service desks: companies with other providers and services could be just as vulnerable.
Speaking to The Register about his finding, De Ceukelaire said locking down a portal could be as easy as finding the right menu item in the settings, or it could be fiddly. Either way, organizations should absolutely audit their now-public-facing internal portals to determine if they are secure, and whether they can be abused by strangers on the other side of the internet.
"The fix really depends on how you use your service desk," he said, "e.g. you may associate incoming emails from external users with new user accounts, but don’t want to give them access to the portal, or you may want to give them access, but only to a few portals and not the internal ones."
Following the publication of De Ceukelaire's findings, Atlassian [3]has issued guidelines for customers on how to secure their service desk portals. ®
Sponsored: [4]Legacy Modernization: Finding Your Way With Low-Code
[1] https://medium.com/@intideceukelaire/hundreds-of-internal-servicedesks-exposed-due-to-covid-19-ecd0baec87bd
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/19/atlassian_free_jira/
[3] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-articles/Tips-for-setting-customer-permissions-in-Jira-Service-Desk/ba-p/1340617
[4] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8553/legacy-modernization-finding-your-way-with-low-code?td=wptl1936
The hope, presumably, is that this ensures employees can easily reach these services from their homes, allowing them to raise support tickets and the like. However, organizations are leaving themselves open to mischief or worse by miscreants, we're told, because the portals are not fully secured. Strangers on the internet can create new accounts, impersonate staff, submit requests for bogus work, potentially access sensitive information, such as payroll details and documentation, and so on.
Inti De Ceukelaire of bug-bounty platform Intigriti [1]claimed earlier this month hundreds of corporate service portals have been exposed to the internet, a 12 per cent increase since he scanned the internet for them last summer – an increase the COVID-19 crisis may have contributed to.
Atlassian finally unleashes free Jira tier – nearly six months late yet just in time for coronavirus crunch [2]READ MORE
"An increasing number of Atlassian Jira Service Desks have been misconfigured to be accessible for anyone to sign up," he said.
"In essence, this is nothing to worry about as service desks may have legitimate reasons to be public. However, a growing number of instances have been repurposed to serve as an internal service ticket portal, allowing attackers to impersonate employees and create legitimate internal requests.
"Verifying the legitimacy of these requests has proven to be far less convenient without offline verification channels: you can’t just walk up to your colleague and ask them about it.
As a proof of concept, De Ceukelaire targeted a set of corporate Atlassian service desk portals he found facing the internet. By simply guessing the URL of the target's service portal, for example:
yourcompanyname.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/user/login
He was able to create a new user account and view the now-public internal portal. That in itself would be bad enough for most companies, but it could then lead to far worse things should an attacker, now armed with a seemingly legitimate employee account, use it to then socially engineer their way into more sensitive systems and information.
De Ceukelaire said he wrote some code that went through a list of 10,000 popular domain names to check for vulnerable Atlassian portals. Of those 10,000, he found that 1,972 had Atlassian portals, and 288 of those, or around 15 per cent, allowed an outside user to create an account.
Keep in mind, this is just for Atlassian Jira service desks: companies with other providers and services could be just as vulnerable.
Speaking to The Register about his finding, De Ceukelaire said locking down a portal could be as easy as finding the right menu item in the settings, or it could be fiddly. Either way, organizations should absolutely audit their now-public-facing internal portals to determine if they are secure, and whether they can be abused by strangers on the other side of the internet.
"The fix really depends on how you use your service desk," he said, "e.g. you may associate incoming emails from external users with new user accounts, but don’t want to give them access to the portal, or you may want to give them access, but only to a few portals and not the internal ones."
Following the publication of De Ceukelaire's findings, Atlassian [3]has issued guidelines for customers on how to secure their service desk portals. ®
Sponsored: [4]Legacy Modernization: Finding Your Way With Low-Code
[1] https://medium.com/@intideceukelaire/hundreds-of-internal-servicedesks-exposed-due-to-covid-19-ecd0baec87bd
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/19/atlassian_free_jira/
[3] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-articles/Tips-for-setting-customer-permissions-in-Jira-Service-Desk/ba-p/1340617
[4] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8553/legacy-modernization-finding-your-way-with-low-code?td=wptl1936
Rather inevitable wasn't it ?
Pascal Monett
We've been hearing for years now how Azure/AWS buckets are not properly secured by devs everywhere, what makes you think that this rush of making everything compatible for remote working was going to go any better ?
I am willing to bet that, had we had months to prepare, there would still be some who couldn't be arsed to do things properly. We didn't have months. We barely had a few days. Sure, I could throw the book at the admins who were not capable of properly configuring their service desk (especially easy from the comfort of my home office chair), but I won't forget that the service desk was but one of the hundred thousand things they had to take care of in record time.
Security is not easy in the best of times. These are just about the polar opposite of the best of times.
Just because you cannot see someone, does not mean they are not there.
The naive thinking displayed here is not new. When I conducted research for my dissertation in the late 1990s, I looked at the use of the Internet by SMEs, comparing UK and German companies. One common finding was that in both countries, companies recognised the new markets that the Internet was going to open up to them (e.g. outside of their current market geography), but failed to see that there would be increased competition from other companies they previously didn't contend with.
This surprised me as it was completely irrational.
So it is here. The Internet provides greater opportunity to work flexibly (completely independent of physical location), but people don't understand that it means that someone in some random country or location can access their services just as conveniently as they do.