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Microsoft Expands Free Logging Capabilities for all U.S. Federal Agencies

Microsoft Expands Free Logging Capabilities for all U.S. Federal Agencies

Feb 24, 2024 Active Directory / Data Protection
Microsoft has expanded free logging capabilities to all U.S. federal agencies using Microsoft Purview Audit irrespective of the license tier, more than six months after a China-linked cyber espionage campaign targeting two dozen organizations came to light. "Microsoft will automatically enable the logs in customer accounts and increase the default log retention period from 90 days to 180 days," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said . "Also, this data will provide new telemetry to help more federal agencies meet logging requirements mandated by [Office of Management and Budget]  Memorandum M-21-31 ." Microsoft, in July 2023,  disclosed  that a China-based nation-state activity group known as Storm-0558 gained unauthorized access to approximately 25 entities in the U.S. and Europe as well as a small number of related individual consumer accounts. "Storm-0558 operates with a high degree of technical tradecraft and operational
Malicious 'SNS Sender' Script Abuses AWS for Bulk Smishing Attacks

Malicious 'SNS Sender' Script Abuses AWS for Bulk Smishing Attacks

Feb 16, 2024 Cyber Threat / Cloud Security
A malicious Python script known as  SNS Sender  is being advertised as a way for threat actors to send bulk smishing messages by abusing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Notification Service ( SNS ). The SMS phishing messages are designed to propagate malicious links that are designed to capture victims' personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card details, SentinelOne  said  in a new report, attributing it to a threat actor named ARDUINO_DAS. "The smishing scams often take the guise of a message from the United States Postal Service (USPS) regarding a missed package delivery," security researcher Alex Delamotte said. SNS Sender is also the first tool observed in the wild that leverages AWS SNS to conduct SMS spamming attacks. SentinelOne said that it identified links between ARDUINO_DAS and more than 150 phishing kits offered for sale. The malware requires a list of phishing links stored in a file named links.txt in its working directory, in addition t
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Microsoft Warns of Cyber Attacks Attempting to Breach Cloud via SQL Server Instance

Microsoft Warns of Cyber Attacks Attempting to Breach Cloud via SQL Server Instance

Oct 04, 2023 Cloud Security / Cyber Threat
Microsoft has detailed a new campaign in which attackers unsuccessfully attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through an SQL Server instance. "The attackers initially exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in an application within the target's environment," security researchers Sunders Bruskin, Hagai Ran Kestenberg, and Fady Nasereldeen  said  in a Tuesday report. "This allowed the attacker to gain access and elevated permissions on a Microsoft SQL Server instance deployed in Azure Virtual Machine (VM)." In the next stage, the threat actors leveraged the new permissions to attempt to move laterally to additional cloud resources by abusing the server's cloud identity, which may possess elevated permissions to likely carry out various malicious actions in the cloud that the identity has access to. Microsoft said it did not find any evidence to suggest that the attackers successfully moved laterally to the cloud resources using the technique
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
Banking Sector Targeted in Open-Source Software Supply Chain Attacks

Banking Sector Targeted in Open-Source Software Supply Chain Attacks

Jul 24, 2023 Supply Chain / Cyber Attack
Cybersecurity researchers said they have discovered what they say is the first open-source software supply chain attacks specifically targeting the banking sector. "These attacks showcased advanced techniques, including targeting specific components in web assets of the victim bank by attaching malicious functionalities to it," Checkmarx  said  in a report published last week. "The attackers employed deceptive tactics such as creating a fake LinkedIn profile to appear credible and customized command-and-control (C2) centers for each target, exploiting legitimate services for illicit activities." The npm packages have since been reported and taken down. The names of the packages were not disclosed. In the first attack, the malware author is said to have uploaded a couple of packages to the npm registry in early April 2023 by posing as an employee of the target bank. The modules came with a preinstall script to activate the infection sequence. To complete the rus
Azure AD Token Forging Technique in Microsoft Attack Extends Beyond Outlook, Wiz Reports

Azure AD Token Forging Technique in Microsoft Attack Extends Beyond Outlook, Wiz Reports

Jul 21, 2023 Email Security / Cyber Attack
The recent attack against  Microsoft's email infrastructure  by a Chinese nation-state actor referred to as Storm-0558 is said to have a broader scope than previously thought. According to cloud security company Wiz, the inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to forge Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) tokens to gain illicit access to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook.com could also have allowed the adversary to forge access tokens for various types of Azure AD applications. This  includes  every application that supports personal account authentication, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams; customers applications that support the "Login with Microsoft functionality," and multi-tenant applications in certain conditions. "Everything in the world of Microsoft leverages Azure Active Directory auth tokens for access," Ami Luttwak, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wiz, said in a statement. "An attacker with an AAD si
Microsoft Blames Massive DDoS Attack for Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive Disruptions

Microsoft Blames Massive DDoS Attack for Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive Disruptions

Jun 19, 2023 Network and Cloud Security
Microsoft on Friday attributed a string of service outages aimed at Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive earlier this month to an uncategorized cluster it tracks under the name  Storm-1359 . "These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools," the tech giant  said  in a post on Friday. Storm-#### (previously DEV-####) is a temporary designation the Windows maker assigns to unknown, emerging, or developing groups whose identity or affiliation hasn't been definitively established yet. While there is no evidence that any customer data was accessed or compromised, the company noted the attacks "temporarily impacted availability" of some services. Redmond said it further observed the threat actor launching  layer 7 DDoS attacks  from multiple cloud services and open proxy infrastructures. This includes HTTP(S) flood attacks, which bombard the target services with a
Researchers Disclose Details of Critical 'CosMiss' RCE Flaw Affecting Azure Cosmos DB

Researchers Disclose Details of Critical 'CosMiss' RCE Flaw Affecting Azure Cosmos DB

Nov 01, 2022
Microsoft on Tuesday said it addressed an authentication bypass vulnerability in  Jupyter Notebooks  for Azure Cosmos DB that enabled full read and write access. The tech giant said the problem was introduced on August 12, 2022, and rectified worldwide on October 6, 2022, two days after responsible disclosure from Orca Security, which dubbed the flaw  CosMiss . "In short, if an attacker had knowledge of a Notebook's 'forwardingId,' which is the UUID of the Notebook Workspace, they would have had full permissions on the Notebook without having to authenticate, including read and write access, and the ability to modify the file system of the container running the notebook," researchers Lidor Ben Shitrit and Roee Sagi said. This container modification could ultimately pave the way for obtaining remote code execution in the Notebook container by overwriting a Python file associated with the  Cosmos DB Explorer  to spawn a reverse shell. Successful exploitation
Microsoft Confirms Server Misconfiguration Led to 65,000+ Companies' Data Leak

Microsoft Confirms Server Misconfiguration Led to 65,000+ Companies' Data Leak

Oct 21, 2022
Microsoft this week confirmed that it inadvertently exposed information related to thousands of customers following a security lapse that left an endpoint publicly accessible over the internet sans any authentication. "This misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers, such as the planning or potential implementation and provisioning of Microsoft services," Microsoft  said  in an alert. Microsoft also emphasized that the B2B leak was "caused by an unintentional misconfiguration on an endpoint that is not in use across the Microsoft ecosystem and was not the result of a security vulnerability." The misconfiguration of the Azure Blob Storage was spotted on September 24, 2022, by cybersecurity company SOCRadar, which termed the leak  BlueBleed . Microsoft said it's in the process of directly notifying impacted customers. The Win
Researchers Detail Azure SFX Flaw That Could've Allowed Attackers to Gain Admin Access

Researchers Detail Azure SFX Flaw That Could've Allowed Attackers to Gain Admin Access

Oct 19, 2022
Cybersecurity researchers have shared more details about a now-patched security flaw in Azure Service Fabric Explorer (SFX) that could potentially enable an attacker to gain administrator privileges on the cluster. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-35829 , carries a CVSS severity rating of 6.2 and was addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  last week. Orca Security, which  discovered and reported  the flaw to the tech giant on August 11, 2022, dubbed the vulnerability  FabriXss  (pronounced "fabrics"). It impacts Azure Fabric Explorer version 8.1.316 and prior. SFX is described by Microsoft as an  open-source tool  for inspecting and managing  Azure Service Fabric  clusters, a distributed systems platform that's used to build and deploy microservices-based cloud applications. The vulnerability is rooted in the fact that a user with  permissions  to "Create Compose Application" through the SFX client can leverage the privileges
Cloud-based Cryptocurrency Miners Targeting GitHub Actions and Azure VMs

Cloud-based Cryptocurrency Miners Targeting GitHub Actions and Azure VMs

Jul 11, 2022
GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. "Attackers can abuse the  runners  or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization's pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency miners to gain profit easily," Trend Micro researcher Magno Logan  said  in a report last week. GitHub Actions ( GHAs ) is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Developers can leverage the feature to create workflows that build and test every pull request to a code repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. Both Linux and Windows runners are hosted on  Standard_DS2_v2  virtual machines on Azure and come with two vCPUs and 7GB of memory. The Japanese com
Microsoft Mitigates RCE Vulnerability Affecting Azure Synapse and Data Factory

Microsoft Mitigates RCE Vulnerability Affecting Azure Synapse and Data Factory

May 10, 2022
Microsoft on Monday disclosed that it mitigated a security flaw affecting Azure Synapse and Azure Data Factory that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-29972 , has been codenamed " SynLapse " by researchers from Orca Security, who reported the flaw to Microsoft in January 2022. "The vulnerability was specific to the third-party Open Database Connectivity ( ODBC ) driver used to connect to Amazon Redshift in Azure Synapse pipelines and Azure Data Factory Integration Runtime ( IR ) and did not impact Azure Synapse as a whole," the company  said . "The vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to perform remote command execution across IR infrastructure not limited to a single tenant." In other words, a malicious actor can weaponize the bug to acquire the Azure Data Factory service certificate and access another tenant's Integration Runtimes to gain access to sensitive informa
Microsoft Azure Vulnerability Exposes PostgreSQL Databases to Other Customers

Microsoft Azure Vulnerability Exposes PostgreSQL Databases to Other Customers

Apr 29, 2022
Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it addressed a pair of issues with the Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server that could result in unauthorized cross-account database access in a region. "By exploiting an elevated permissions bug in the Flexible Server authentication process for a replication user, a malicious user could leverage an improperly anchored regular expression to bypass authentication to gain access to other customers' databases," Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)  said . New York City-based cloud security company Wiz, which uncovered the flaws, dubbed the exploit chain " ExtraReplica ." Microsoft said it mitigated the bug within 48 hours of disclosure on January 13, 2022. Specifically, it relates to a case of privilege escalation in the Azure PostgreSQL engine to gain code execution and a cross-account authentication bypass by means of a forged certificate, allowing an attacker to create a database in the target's Azure r
Finding Attack Paths in Cloud Environments

Finding Attack Paths in Cloud Environments

Apr 12, 2022
The mass adoption of cloud infrastructure is fully justified by innumerable advantages. As a result, today, organizations' most sensitive business applications, workloads, and data are in the cloud. Hackers, good and bad, have noticed that trend and effectively evolved their attack techniques to match this new tantalizing target landscape. With threat actors' high reactivity and adaptability, it is recommended to assume that organizations are under attack and that some user accounts or applications might already have been compromised. Finding out exactly which assets are put at risk through compromised accounts or breached assets requires mapping potential attack paths across a comprehensive map of all the relationships between assets.  Today, mapping potential attack paths is performed with scanning tools such as AzureHound or AWSPX. Those are graph-based tools enabling the visualization of assets and resources relationships within the related cloud service provider. By r
Over 200 Malicious NPM Packages Caught Targeting Azure Developers

Over 200 Malicious NPM Packages Caught Targeting Azure Developers

Mar 24, 2022
A new large scale supply chain attack has been observed targeting Azure developers with no less than 218 malicious NPM packages with the goal of stealing personal identifiable information. "After manually inspecting some of these packages, it became apparent that this was a targeted attack against the entire  @azure NPM scope , by an attacker that employed an automatic script to create accounts and upload malicious packages that cover the entirety of that scope," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said  in a new report. The entire set of malicious packages was disclosed to the NPM maintainers roughly two days after they were published earlier this week, leading to their quick removal, but not before each of the packages were downloaded around 50 times on average. The attack refers to what's called typosquatting, which takes place when bad actors push rogue packages with names mimicking legitimate libraries to a public software registry such
Microsoft Azure 'AutoWarp' Bug Could Have Let Attackers Access Customers' Accounts

Microsoft Azure 'AutoWarp' Bug Could Have Let Attackers Access Customers' Accounts

Mar 08, 2022
Details have been disclosed about a now-addressed critical vulnerability in Microsoft's  Azure Automation  service that could have permitted unauthorized access to other Azure customer accounts and take over control. "This attack could mean full control over resources and data belonging to the targeted account, depending on the permissions assigned by the customer," Orca Security researcher Yanir Tsarimi  said  in a report published Monday. The flaw potentially put several entities at risk, including an unnamed telecommunications company, two car manufacturers, a banking conglomerate, and big four accounting firms, among others, the Israeli cloud infrastructure security company added. The Azure Automation service  allows  for process automation, configuration management, and handling operating system updates within a defined maintenance window across Azure and non-Azure environments. Dubbed " AutoWarp ," the issue affects all users of the Azure Automation
Microsoft Warns of Cross-Account Takeover Bug in Azure Container Instances

Microsoft Warns of Cross-Account Takeover Bug in Azure Container Instances

Sep 10, 2021
Microsoft on Wednesday said it remediated a vulnerability in its Azure Container Instances ( ACI ) services that could have been weaponized by a malicious actor "to access other customers' information" in what the researchers described as the "first cross-account container takeover in the public cloud." An attacker exploiting the weakness could execute malicious commands on other users' containers, steal customer secrets and images deployed to the platform. The Windows maker did not share any additional specifics related to the flaw, save that  affected customers  "revoke any privileged credentials that were deployed to the platform before August 31, 2021." Azure Container Instances is a managed service that allows users to run Docker  containers  directly in a serverless cloud environment, without requiring the use of virtual machines, clusters, or orchestrators. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team dubbed the vulnerabilit
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