Cloudflare has disclosed a likely nation-state attack on its infrastructure, where threat actors utilized stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to its Atlassian server. The intrusion, detected between November 14 and 24, 2023, aimed to obtain persistent and widespread access to Cloudflare’s global network. The sophisticated attacker underwent a four-day reconnaissance period, accessing Atlassian Confluence and Jira portals, creating a rogue account, and gaining persistent access. The breach exposed approximately 120 code repositories, with 76 estimated to be exfiltrated, focusing on areas related to backups, network configuration, identity management, and Cloudflare’s use of Terraform and Kubernetes.
To address the incident, Cloudflare implemented precautionary measures, rotating over 5,000 production credentials, segmenting test and staging systems, and performing forensic triages on nearly 4,900 systems. A global reboot and reimaging of all machines were conducted. The attacker, leveraging an access token and service account credentials stolen from Okta’s support case management system in October 2023, utilized AWS, Atlassian Bitbucket, Moveworks, and Smartsheet accounts. Cloudflare acknowledged its failure to rotate these credentials, mistakenly assuming their disuse. The threat actor’s unsuccessful attempt to access a console server in São Paulo, Brazil, was also reported.
Cloudflare shared that it promptly terminated malicious connections on November 24, 2023, and engaged CrowdStrike for an independent assessment. While the stolen credentials only allowed access to the Atlassian environment, including code repositories, the company affirmed that encrypted secrets found in some repositories were immediately rotated. The attacker’s focus on information about the architecture, security, and management of Cloudflare’s global network suggests a targeted approach to gain insight into the company’s infrastructure and operations.
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