DataBreaches.Net

Menu
  • About
  • Breach Notification Laws
  • Privacy Policy
  • Transparency Report
Menu

Atlassian hacked (update 1)

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Dissent

From the Atlassian company blog:

Around 9pm U.S. PST Sunday evening, Atlassian detected a security breach on one of our internal systems. The breach potentially exposed passwords for customers who purchased Atlassian products before July 2008. During July 2008, we migrated our customer database into Atlassian Crowd, our identity management product, and all customer passwords were encrypted. However, the old database table was not taken offline or deleted, and it is this database table that we believe could have been exposed during the breach.

[…]

The impact

What’s affected?

If you have an Atlassian account from before July 2008 — you should definitely change your password with us. Also, if you used that username/password combination for any other site, we recommend you change it there as well to prevent people potentially gaining access to other systems.

What’s not affected?

  • If you created your Atlassian account after July 2008, you should not be affected. We notified you via email because we feel it’s important every customer is aware of the situation.
  • If you’re an Atlassian customer running our products behind the firewall, your passwords are not affected. By default, our products store the passwords for the userbase in an encrypted form.
  • If you’re an Atlassian SaaS or hosted customer, your userbase and customer data are not affected. Those are stored in another system.
  • No credit card or payment details were accessible.

[…]

Lessons we’ve learned today
Firstly, we made a big error. For this we are, of course, extremely sorry. The legacy customer database, with passwords stored in plain text, was a liability. Even though it wasn’t active, it should have been deleted. There’s no logical explanation for why it wasn’t, other than as we moved off one project, and on to the next one, we dropped the ball and screwed up.

Secondly, in attempting to be as open as possible, we sent a communication to all customers — not just those affected — at once. Our intent was to keep everyone notified of the situation, but we appear to have done more to raise alarm with unaffected customers. Beyond that, with hundreds of thousands of accounts changing passwords simultaneously, our web servers crumpled — causing yet more user alarm. We apologise for the extra consternation this caused — our web servers are now back purring along as normal.

In hindsight, we should have reset passwords for affected users on their behalf. This would have avoided the unexpected transactional load on our web servers, and communicated the problem to the rest of our customers in a different way.

Hat-tip The Next Web.

Update 1: Bob McMillan reports:

Hackers broke into a server used by the Apache Software Foundation to keep track of software bugs.

The attack did not compromise the open-source Web server’s source code repository, but it did give hackers access to a server used by the project to keep track of bugs, and they also obtained low-privilege accounts on another server used to maintain the people.apache.org Web site, according to Philip Gollucci, vice president of Apache infrastructure. “None of the source code was affected in any way,” he said.

By taking advantage of a common Web programming error known as a cross-site scripting bug, and then using another password-guessing attack, hackers were able to break into the Atlassian JIRA software used by Apache. They then installed a password stealing program on that software, ultimately seizing full control of the machine. That gave them access to two other programs hosted by Apache on the same server, the Confluence wiki program and Bugzilla.

Category: Breach IncidentsBusiness SectorHackNon-U.S.

Post navigation

← County workers warned of ID theft in retirement association
Survey: Patients May Lie if Electronic Medical Records Are Shared →

Now more than ever

"Stand with Ukraine:" above raised hands. The illustration is in blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine's flag.

Search

Browse by Categories

Recent Posts

  • Beyond the Pond Phish: Unraveling Lazarus Group’s Evolving Tactics
  • Akira doesn’t keep its promises to victims — SuspectFile
  • Fraudsters, murderers, students: who the GRU assembled a team of hacker provocateurs from and why it failed
  • Order of Psychologists of Lombardy fined 30,000 € for inadequate data security protection and detection following ransomware attack
  • Lower Merion School District says a data breach was caused by a computer glitch (1)
  • After $1 Million Ransom Demand, Virgin Islands Lottery Restores Operations Without Paying Hackers
  • Junior Defence Contractor Arrested For Leaking Indian Naval Secrets To Suspected Pakistani Spies
  • Mysterious leaker GangExposed outs Conti kingpins in massive ransomware data dump
  • Resource: HoganLovells Asia-Pacific Data, Privacy and Cybersecurity Guide 2025
  • Class action settlement following ransomware attack will cost Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center about $52 million

No, You Can’t Buy a Post or an Interview

This site does not accept sponsored posts or link-back arrangements. Inquiries about either are ignored.

And despite what some trolls may try to claim: DataBreaches has never accepted even one dime to interview or report on anyone. Nor will DataBreaches ever pay anyone for data or to interview them.

Want to Get Our RSS Feed?

Grab it here:

https://databreaches.net/feed/

RSS Recent Posts on PogoWasRight.org

  • Stewart Baker vs. Orin Kerr on “The Digital Fourth Amendment”
  • Fears Grow Over ICE’s Reach Into Schools
  • Resource: HoganLovells Asia-Pacific Data, Privacy and Cybersecurity Guide 2025
  • She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down.
  • Why AI May Be Listening In on Your Next Doctor’s Appointment
  • Watch out for activist judges trying to deprive us of our rights to safe reproductive healthcare
  • Nebraska Bans Minor Social Media Accounts Without Parental Consent

Have a News Tip?

Email: Tips[at]DataBreaches.net

Signal: +1 516-776-7756

Contact Me

Email: info[at]databreaches.net

Mastodon: Infosec.Exchange/@PogoWasRight

Signal: +1 516-776-7756

DMCA Concern: dmca[at]databreaches.net
© 2009 – 2025 DataBreaches.net and DataBreaches LLC. All rights reserved.