deleting wicked users

[Kevin Mote]

Recently a "white hat" hacker team was hired by our IT department to probe for vulnerabilities in our intranet, including our JIRA installation. (JIRA was not compromised, btw -- woohoo!). During the exercise, they entered all sorts of script into the JIRA sign-in fields, creating spurious users. I was able to delete all the false accounts except the following two, which still remain in my user list:

• http://netsparker.com/n?.jspa
• php://filter//resource=http://netsparker.com/n?.jspa

These two lines are actually listed as usernames in the Users list. Problem is, when I try to delete them, the operation fails with a java.lang.NullPointerException at

com.atlassian.jira.web.action.admin.user.DeleteUser.doValidation(DeleteUser.java:56)

Is there any way to manually remove these users (perhaps in the database itself)?

[Pedro Souza · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Before doing any delete operations in the database, I would recomend you to rename these users, and then try to delete it again.

Since the username is like an URL, perhaps it might be causing conflict in the application side.

If you're still facing the problem even renaming the user, I would strongly recommend you to backup your database before applying any delete operation on this, when you have the backup, the delete query should be this one:

delete from cwd_user
where user_name in ('http://netsparker.com/n?.jspa', 'php://filter//resource=http://netsparker.com/n?.jspa')

I hope it helps!

Regards.

[Kevin Mote]

Good suggestion, but unfortunately it looks like I will have to wait until I upgrade to v6.0 to edit usernames. (That feature is not available in 5.x). Rather than mucking about in the database, I think I'll wait for my upgrade.

Thanks!