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Microsoft has released patches to address two Critical-rated security flaws impacting Azure AI Face Service and Microsoft Account that could allow a malicious actor to escalate their privileges under certain conditions. The flaws are listed below - CVE-2025-21396 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Microsoft Account Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2025-21415 (CVSS score: 9.9) - Azure AI Face Service Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "Authentication bypass by spoofing in Azure AI Face Service allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft in an advisory for CVE-2025-21415, crediting an anonymous researcher for reporting the flaw. CVE-2025-21396, on the other hand, stems from a case of missing authorization that could permit an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network. A security researcher who goes by the alias Sugobet has been acknowledged for discovering it. The tech giant also noted that it's aware of the existen...

Google on Wednesday shed light on a financially motivated threat actor named TRIPLESTRENGTH for its opportunistic targeting of cloud environments for cryptojacking and on-premise ransomware attacks. "This actor engaged in a variety of threat activity, including cryptocurrency mining operations on hijacked cloud resources and ransomware activity," the tech giant's cloud division said in its 11th Threat Horizons Report . TRIPLESTRENGTH engages in a trifecta of malicious attacks, including illicit cryptocurrency mining, ransomware and extortion, and advertising access to various cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Linode, OVHCloud, and Digital Ocean, to other threat actors. Initial access to target cloud instances is facilitated by means of stolen credentials and cookies, some of which originate from Raccoon information stealer infection logs. The hijacked environments are then abused to create compute resources for mining cryp...

Microsoft has revealed that it's pursuing legal action against a "foreign-based threat–actor group" for operating a hacking-as-a-service infrastructure to intentionally get around the safety controls of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) services and produce offensive and harmful content. The tech giant's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) said it has observed the threat actors "develop sophisticated software that exploited exposed customer credentials scraped from public websites," and "sought to identify and unlawfully access accounts with certain generative AI services and purposely alter the capabilities of those services." The adversaries then used these services, such as Azure OpenAI Service, and monetized the access by selling them to other malicious actors, providing them with detailed instructions as to how to use these custom tools to generate harmful content. Microsoft said it discovered the activity in July 2024. The Windows maker...

Microsoft has announced that it's making an "unexpected change" to the way .NET installers and archives are distributed, requiring developers to update their production and DevOps infrastructure. "We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other kinds of breakage," Richard Lander, a program manager on the .NET team, said in a statement last week. The move is the result of the fact that some .NET binaries and installers are hosted on Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) domains that end in .azureedge[.]net -- dotnetcli.azureedge.net and dotnetbuilds.azureedge.net -- which are hosted on Edgio. Last month, web infrastructure and security company Akamai acquired select assets from Edgio following its bankruptcy. As part of this transition, the Edgio platform is scheduled to end service on January 15, 2025. Given that the .azureedge[.]net domains could ceas...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered three security weaknesses in Microsoft's Azure Data Factory Apache Airflow integration that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed an attacker to gain the ability to conduct various covert actions, including data exfiltration and malware deployment. "Exploiting these flaws could allow attackers to gain persistent access as shadow administrators over the entire Airflow Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in an analysis published earlier this month. The vulnerabilities, albeit classified as low severity by Microsoft, are listed below - Misconfigured Kubernetes RBAC in Airflow cluster Misconfigured secret handling of Azure's internal Geneva service, and Weak authentication for Geneva Besides obtaining unauthorized access, the attacker could take advantage of the flaws in the Geneva service to potentially tamper with log data or send fake logs to avoid raising suspicion when c...

Cyber attackers never stop inventing new ways to compromise their targets. That's why organizations must stay updated on the latest threats.  Here's a quick rundown of the current malware and phishing attacks you need to know about to safeguard your infrastructure before they reach you. Zero-day Attack: Corrupted Malicious Files Evade Detection by Most Security Systems  The analyst team at ANY.RUN recently shared their analysis of an ongoing zero-day attack . It has been active since at least August and still remains unaddressed by most detection software to this day. The attack involves the use of intentionally corrupted Word documents and ZIP archives with malicious files inside. VirusTotal shows 0 detections for one of the corrupted files Due to corruption, security systems cannot properly identify the type of these files and run analysis on them, which results in zero threat detections. Word will ask the user if they want to restore a corrupted file Once these fi...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw impacting Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges and access credentials for services used by the cluster. "An attacker with command execution in a pod running within an affected Azure Kubernetes Services cluster could download the configuration used to provision the cluster node, extract the transport layer security (TLS) bootstrap tokens, and perform a TLS bootstrap attack to read all secrets within the cluster," Google-owned Mandiant said . Clusters using "Azure CNI" for the "Network configuration" and "Azure" for the "Network Policy" have been found to be impacted by the privilege escalation bug. Microsoft has since addressed the issue following responsible disclosure. The attack technique devised by the threat intelligence firm hinges on accessing a little-known component called Azure WireS...

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...

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 addit...

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...

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...

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 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 ...

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 exploitatio...

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...

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...