Threats / Atlassian / CVE-2022-26138
CVE-2022-26138
· EUVD no mirror located
· GCVE no mirror located
Verified 2026-08-04
Atlassian Confluence vulnerability
Atlassian Confluence Questions For App contains hard-coded credentials exposed in plaintext, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to gain unauthorized access to Confluence and view all content accessible to confluence-users group membe
Verdict
Today item — known-exploited.
A remote attacker can exploit hard-coded credentials in the Questions For Confluence App to authenticate without authorization, access sensitive content, and potentially escalate privileges within the Confluence environment.
CISA KEV Yes · 2022-07-295EPSS 0.9817 (verify live)6Exploit Weaponized · public PoC7CVSS 9.8 (CISA)4CISA SSVC Exploitation: active · Automatable: yes · Impact: total4
01
Is it exploitable?
— the evidence, ranked above the scoreExploit available
Fully weaponized — public exploit code is cataloged for this vulnerability.We link the existence of the exploit; we do not host or redistribute payloads.
Reported exploitation
740 independent public reports of in-the-wild exploitation are cataloged.Distinct reporting sources (vendor, incident response, government); open them for the underlying claims.
Exploited in the wild
Listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-07-29).
Probability (EPSS)
EPSS 0.9817 — modeled likelihood of exploitation activity.EPSS is a daily-changing model output — open the source for today's value.
Severity / affected
CVSS 9.8 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H) · Affected: Atlassian, Confluence. Confirm exact fixed builds in the vendor advisory.CVSS — CISA-assigned via the ADP container (CVE.org), version 3.1; the CNA left no metrics, so CISA's own score is used ahead of NVD.
Weakness (CWE)
Mapped to CWE-798 Hard-coded Credentials — weakness family: Authentication.CWE — CNA-assigned (CVE.org); the weakness class drives how the flaw is exploited.
CISA SSVC (triage disposition)
Exploitation: active · Automatable: yes · Technical Impact: totalCISA's own stakeholder-specific triage inputs, published in the CVE record (CISA Coordinator role). NOTE: this is CISA's three decision points; the final Act/Attend/Track decision also requires a Mission & Well-being input not published here, so no overall decision is asserted.
Currency of the record
CISA added this to its KEV catalog 9 days after the CVE record was published.KEV lag = CISA-KEV dateAdded − CVE.org datePublished; a floor on how long the known-exploited flaw sat in the public record before the federal catalog listed it. Severity/weakness here is CNA- or CISA-assigned (current at disclosure), independent of NVD's analysis backlog.
Public exploit available
Public exploit tooling is catalogued for this CVE (a public proof-of-concept / detection template). Catalog entries: nuclei template. We link the catalog page(s) only — no payload or code is hosted or restated here.Link, never host — the catalog page is the source; basicsecurity.net does not redistribute payloads.
02
Who’s exploiting it?
— attribution turns risk into urgencyAttribution not established
No confirmed (advisory-backed) threat-actor attribution is established for this record. Absence of a named actor is not absence of compromise — see Coverage & confidence.
03
Why it matters
— the attack path, told twice: adversary, then board1
Front door — unauthenticated access narrative 1
Attacker
I discover hard-coded credentials in the Confluence Questions For App and use them to authenticate as a legitimate user without requiring valid credentials.
Business
Unauthorized access to Confluence content compromises data confidentiality and enables potential intellectual property theft or competitive intelligence gathering.
2
Keys to the kingdom — privilege/identity takeover narrative 2
Attacker
I leverage the compromised account to enumerate and access all content visible to the confluence-users group, including sensitive documents and discussions.
Business
Exposure of confidential business information, project plans, and internal communications creates compliance violations and reputational damage.
3
Lateral reach — past segmentation narrative 3
Attacker
I use the authenticated session to modify or delete content, or establish persistence for ongoing unauthorized access to the Confluence instance.
Business
Data integrity is compromised, operational continuity is disrupted, and incident response costs increase significantly.
04
What to do
— defensible action- Remediate per the vendor advisory — confirm the fixed build for your version and verify exposure.1
Say it to the boardA vulnerability with this evidence profile is a defensible budget line, not a backlog ticket — fund the change against the proof above.
05