Security News > 2020 > August > Over 30 Vulnerabilities Discovered Across 20 CMS Products
Researchers have identified more than 30 vulnerabilities across 20 popular content management systems, including Microsoft SharePoint and Atlassian Confluence.
"In the most simple attack scenario, the attacker has access to the target CMS applications such as regular Sharepoint users being able to create their own sites and therefore being able to provide their own templates," Muñoz explained.
"In some cases we were able to get trial accounts on cloud-based CMS platforms and perform the attacks from our own trial admin account. These were the most interesting cases since we were able to compromise the underlying infrastructure which could have allowed us to initiate attacks against other tenants."
Their analysis of Java template engines such as Apache Velocity and FreeMarker, JinJava and Pebble led to the identification of ways to escape template sandboxes and execute arbitrary code in products such as Atlassian Confluence, Apache OFBiz, XWiki, Liferay, Alfresco, Netflix Titus, Crafter CMS and dotCMS. Muñoz explained that the methods they used to create or modify templates - this includes XSS and server-side template injection attacks - are not new, and instead their research focused on bypassing sandboxes and mitigations.
The researchers say their work can be useful to developers and security teams who want to protect their products and systems against potential attacks.