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Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

promptarmor.com

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Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#111
post #106
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the agent itself concatenates a new URL together - with leaked data after a ? - you should block that from being fetched. You're correct of course, I just want to note that the exfiltrated data could be in any part of the URL, so the absence of a query string doesn't indicate that no payload has been encoded into the URL. Arbitrary example, you can include credentials in a URL, so you could encode the exfiltrate…

Right, I should have been more clear. It's not about the ?, it's about not being able to dynamically construct a URL at all. Otherwise you could set up wildcard DNS and extract data to base64encodedstolendata.evil.com

Joke’s on you, I’ve blocked evil.com

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#112
post #5

I can’t get over how bad “Rovo” is. Somehow more aggressive and useless than Microsoft putting “Copilot” everywhere. It’s objectively worse than using something like Cowork + MCP, AND they injected it into every single page on JIRA and Confluent which has made web browsing way slower while all the junk is loading.

Rovo makes for an INCREDIBLE time reading jira tickets and confluence pages. Someone wrote YES in all caps in a page ? Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024. Whenever I feel like I'm bad at software development, I look at Atlassian and I feel good.

> Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024.

The problem with our brave new AI world is I can’t tell if this is real or not

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#113
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the markdown agent instructions they provide in their new agentic `twg` cli? 70k tokens one average, there are more than one... Rovo is the worse Ai I have used, I suggested they stop trying and let us have model choice. Save money and don't do things out of their skill sets

Don’t use it? You don’t have to

Yup, we stopped using Atlassian completely. Highly recommended.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#114
post #63

I find it difficult to be impressed by "prompt injection" attacks that require the victim to enter the malicious prompt themselves --- like, really? If you tell Rovo to exfiltrate your data, it'll do it? Obviously, there should be URL protection rules to control what it can access, but this requires a very specific and unlikely set of circumstances to exploit.

It's more interesting if I attach a file to a JIRA ticket that we both have access to and via some query you send to the AI (that returns my malicious ticket) it causes data exfiltration of tickets that you have access to but I do not have access to. I think that's more compelling as an example than the one they provide.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#117
post #36

> Rovo's URL retrieval tool is insecure: there are no protections against opening a URL that has been dynamically created by the agent. Here, Rovo is manipulated to append sensitive data to an attacker's URL. I think it was Anthropic that first introduced a pattern that completely locks this down: your URL retrieval tool should only work for URLs that have previously been typed into the conversation by a user or have…

One of the latest mitigations is to make sure that a URL an agent visits has been indexed by a search engine crawler. At least that is what OpenAI does now in ChatGPT.

That makes sure that not a large amount of private data is leaked in one request. Assuming that if a URL is indexed, it is public data. However, there are still bypasses with using many requests to leak information, like a request per character of pre-indexed URLs.

I have some demos of doing that on my blog, but it makes it more involved for an attacker. And that could also be detected. Still not perfect, but a solid improvement, for a generic agent like ChatGPT.

There is paper OpenAI wrote a few months ago that explains how they do it: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2026/data-exfiltration-...

It's not a 100% bullet proof approach either, but pretty good.

Regarding the point on using URLs returned from trusted tool calls. That is similar to using pre-indexed URLs: If a "trusted tool" includes things like read a document, read an email,... an attacker can return a large list of afterwards "safe" urls, like 26 to cover A-Z. And then an attack can render many requests, e.g. character by character. But, again, similar to the pre-indexing, things are getting more a lot more expensive for an attacker that way. However, still not impossible.

For agents that have a specific purpose simple domain allow-listing is also a pretty effective idea in to prevent attacker controlled endpoints.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#118
Do people put secrets in Atlassian tools? Sounds like the worst place to do that. If anything I would want my main wiki/project/ticket management tools/code repos to be as open as possible (I mean to read) to help collaboration.

The part about not having guardrail against calls to external urls is wild though.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#119

Do people put secrets in Atlassian tools? Sounds like the worst place to do that. If anything I would want my main wiki/project/ticket management tools/code repos to be as open as possible (I mean to read) to help collaboration. The part about not having guardrail against calls to external urls is wild though.

Not "secrets" usually, but people tend to consider the corporate IP embodied in Jira to be classified as something other than Public.

Teamwork Graph exposes all the people working on stealth products with code names right alongside their other work anyway.

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