Software development and collaboration solutions provider Atlassian on Wednesday informed customers that it has patched a critical code execution vulnerability affecting some of its Jira products.
According to Atlassian, security researcher Harrison Neal discovered that Jira Data Center — including Software Data Center and Core Data Center — and Jira Service Management Data Center software development products are affected by a critical flaw related to missing authentication for the Ehcache RMI network service.
An attacker who can connect to this service on port 40001 or 40011 can execute arbitrary code in Jira through deserialization.
“While Atlassian strongly suggests restricting access to the Ehcache ports to only Data Center instances, fixed versions of Jira will now require a shared secret in order to allow access to the Ehcache service,” Atlassian said in a security advisory.
The company pointed out that non-Data Center instances of Jira Server and Jira Service Management are not impacted, and neither are Jira Cloud and Jira Service Management Cloud customers.
Jira Data Center users have been advised to update their installations to versions 8.5.16, 8.13.8 or 8.17.0. Jira Service Management Data Center users can patch the vulnerability by ensuring that they are running versions 4.5.16, 4.13.8 or 4.17.0.
As for mitigations, Atlassian recommends restricting access to the Ehcache RMI ports to only cluster instances, using firewalls or other types of security products.
Both profit-driven cybercriminals and state-sponsored threat actors have been known to target vulnerabilities in Atlassian products so it’s important that organizations don’t ignore these security holes.
Last month, cybersecurity firm Check Point disclosed several vulnerabilities that could have been chained to take over Atlassian accounts or access a company’s Bitbucket-hosted source code.
Related: Critical Vulnerability Addressed in Jira Service Desk
Related: JIRA Misconfiguration Leaks Data of Fortune 500 Companies
Related: AESDDoS Botnet Targets Vulnerability in Atlassian’s Confluence Server

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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