Microsoft Azure | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A suspected China-nexus cyber espionage group has been attributed to an attacks targeting large business-to-business IT service providers in Southern Europe as part of a campaign codenamed Operation Digital Eye . The intrusions took place from late June to mid-July 2024, cybersecurity companies SentinelOne SentinelLabs and Tinexta Cyber said in a joint report shared with The Hacker News, adding the activities were detected and neutralized before they could progress to the data exfiltration phase. "The intrusions could have enabled the adversaries to establish strategic footholds and compromise downstream entities," security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Luigi Martire said . "The threat actors abused Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Azure infrastructure for C2 [command-and-control] purposes, attempting to evade detection by making malicious activities appear legitimate." It's currently not known which China-linked hacking group is behind the attacks,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two security flaws in Microsoft's Azure Health Bot Service that, if exploited, could permit a malicious actor to achieve lateral movement within customer environments and access sensitive patient data. The critical issues, now patched by Microsoft, could have allowed access to cross-tenant resources within the service, Tenable said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The Azure AI Health Bot Service is a cloud platform that enables developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and create copilots to manage administrative workloads and engage with their patients. This includes bots created by insurance service providers to allow customers to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services, as well as bots managed by healthcare entities to help patients find appropriate care or look up nearby doctors. Tenable's research specifically focuses on on...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

While cloud adoption has been top of mind for many IT professionals for nearly a decade, it's only in recent months, with industry changes and announcements from key players, that many recognize the time to make the move is now. It may feel like a daunting task, but tools exist to help you move your virtual machines (VMs) to a public cloud provider – like Microsoft Azure – with relative ease. Transitioning from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Azure requires careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth migration process. In this guide, we'll walk through the steps involved in moving your virtualized infrastructure to the cloud giant, Microsoft Azure. Whether you're migrating your entire data center or specific workloads, these steps will help you navigate the transition effectively. 1. Assess Your Environment: Before diving into the migration process, assess your current VMware vSphere environment thoro...

The U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board ( CSRB ) has criticized Microsoft for a series of security lapses that led to the breach of nearly two dozen companies across Europe and the U.S. by a China-based nation-state group called Storm-0558 last year. The findings, released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday, found that the intrusion was preventable, and that it became successful due to a "cascade of Microsoft's avoidable errors." "It identified a series of Microsoft operational and strategic decisions that collectively pointed to a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management, at odds with the company's centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations," the DHS  said  in a statement. The CSRB also lambasted the tech titan for failing to detect the compromise on its own, instead relying on a customer to reac...

An Iran-nexus threat actor known as  UNC1549  has been attributed with medium confidence to a new set of attacks targeting aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, including Israel and the U.A.E. Other targets of the cyber espionage activity likely include Turkey, India, and Albania, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new analysis. UNC1549 is said to overlap with  Smoke Sandstorm  (previously Bohrium) and  Crimson Sandstorm  (previously Curium), the latter of which is an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) affiliated group also known as Imperial Kitten, TA456, Tortoiseshell, and Yellow Liderc. "This suspected UNC1549 activity has been active since at least June 2022 and is still ongoing as of February 2024," the company  said . "While regional in nature and focused mostly in the Middle East, the targeting includes entities operating worldwide." The attacks entail the use of Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure for command...

Cybersecurity researchers have developed what's the first fully undetectable cloud-based cryptocurrency miner leveraging the Microsoft  Azure Automation  service without racking up any charges. Cybersecurity company SafeBreach said it discovered three different methods to run the miner, including one that can be executed on a victim's environment without attracting any attention. "While this research is significant because of its potential impact on cryptocurrency mining, we also believe it has serious implications for other areas, as the techniques could be used to achieve any task that requires code execution on Azure," security researcher Ariel Gamrian  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The study mainly set out to identify an "ultimate crypto miner" that offers unlimited access to computational resources, while simultaneously requiring little-to-no maintenance, is cost-free, and undetectable. That's where Azure Automation comes in. ...

More details have emerged about a set of now-patched cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the  Microsoft Azure HDInsight  open-source analytics service that could be weaponized by a threat actor to carry out malicious activities. "The identified vulnerabilities consisted of six stored XSS and two reflected XSS vulnerabilities, each of which could be exploited to perform unauthorized actions, varying from data access to session hijacking and delivering malicious payloads," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The issues were addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for August 2023. The disclosure comes three months after similar shortcomings were reported in the  Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry  that could have been exploited for unauthorized data access and modifications. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-35393  (CVSS score: 4.5) - Azure Apac...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of privilege escalation associated with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application by taking advantage of an abandoned reply URL. "An attacker could leverage this abandoned URL to redirect authorization codes to themselves, exchanging the ill-gotten authorization codes for access tokens," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a technical report published last week. "The threat actor could then call Power Platform API via a middle-tier service and obtain elevated privileges." Following responsible disclosure on April 5, 2023, the issue was addressed by Microsoft via an update released a day later. Secureworks has also made available an  open-source tool  that other organizations can use to scan for abandoned reply URLs. Reply URL , also called redirect URI, refers to the location where the authorization server sends the user once the app has been successfully authorized and grant...

A malicious actor has been linked to a cloud credential stealing campaign in June 2023 that's focused on Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, marking the adversary's expansion in targeting beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS). The findings come from  SentinelOne  and  Permiso , which said the "campaigns share similarity with tools attributed to the notorious TeamTNT cryptojacking crew," although it emphasized that "attribution remains challenging with script-based tools." They also overlap with an ongoing TeamTNT campaign  disclosed  by Aqua called Silentbob that leverages misconfigured cloud services to drop malware as part of what's said to be a testing effort, while also linking  SCARLETEEL  attacks to the threat actor, citing infrastructure commonalities. "TeamTNT is scanning for credentials across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and GCP," Aqua noted. The attacks, which single out public-facing Docker instanc...

A security shortcoming in Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Open Authorization ( OAuth ) process could have been exploited to achieve full account takeover, researchers said. California-based identity and access management service Descope, which discovered and reported the issue in April 2023, dubbed it  nOAuth . "nOAuth is an authentication implementation flaw that can affect Microsoft Azure AD multi-tenant OAuth applications," Omer Cohen, chief security officer at Descope,  said . The misconfiguration has to do with how a malicious actor can modify email attributes under "Contact Information" in the Azure AD account and exploit the "Log in with Microsoft" feature to hijack a victim account. To pull off the attack, all an adversary has to do is to create and access an Azure AD admin account and modify their email address to that of a victim and take advantage of the single sign-on scheme on a vulnerable app or website. "If the app merges u...

Two "dangerous" security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry that could have been exploited to carry out cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. "The vulnerabilities allowed unauthorized access to the victim's session within the compromised Azure service iframe, which can lead to severe consequences, including unauthorized data access, unauthorized modifications, and disruption of the Azure services iframes," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS attacks  take place when threat actors inject arbitrary code into an otherwise trusted website, which then gets executed every time when unsuspecting users visit the site. The two flaws identified by Orca leverage a weakness in the postMessage iframe, which enables cross-origin communication between Window objects. This meant that the shortcoming could be abused to embed endpoints within remote servers usin...

Three new security flaws have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure API Management service that could be abused by malicious actors to gain access to sensitive information or backend services. This includes two server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaws and one instance of unrestricted file upload functionality in the API Management developer portal, according to Israeli cloud security firm Ermetic. "By abusing the SSRF vulnerabilities, attackers could send requests from the service's CORS Proxy and the hosting proxy itself, access internal Azure assets, deny service and bypass web application firewalls," security researcher Liv Matan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "With the file upload path traversal, attackers could upload malicious files to Azure's hosted internal workload." Azure API Management is a  multicloud management platform  that allows organizations to securely expose their APIs to external and internal customers and enable a wide ...

A "by-design flaw" uncovered in Microsoft Azure could be exploited by attackers to gain access to storage accounts, move laterally in the environment, and even execute remote code. "It is possible to abuse and leverage Microsoft Storage Accounts by manipulating Azure Functions to steal access-tokens of higher privilege identities, move laterally, potentially access critical business assets, and execute remote code (RCE)," Orca said in a new  report  shared with The Hacker News. The exploitation path that underpins this attack is a mechanism called  Shared Key authorization , which is enabled by default on storage accounts. According to Microsoft, Azure generates two 512-bit storage account access keys when creating a storage account. These keys can be used to authorize access to data via Shared Key authorization, or via SAS tokens that are signed with the shared key. "Storage account access keys provide full access to the configuration of a storage accoun...

Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Azure Service Fabric Explorer ( SFX ) that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Tracked as  CVE-2023-23383  (CVSS score: 8.2), the issue has been dubbed "Super FabriXss" by Orca Security, a nod to the  FabriXss flaw  (CVE-2022-35829, CVSS score: 6.2) that was fixed by Microsoft in October 2022. "The Super FabriXss vulnerability enables remote attackers to leverage an XSS vulnerability to achieve remote code execution on a container hosted on a Service Fabric node without the need for authentication," security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS refers to a kind of  client-side code injection  attack that makes it possible to upload malicious scripts into otherwise trusted websites. The scripts then get executed every time a victim visits the compromised website, thereby leading to unintended consequences. While both FabriXss ...

A new critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw discovered impacting multiple services related to Microsoft Azure could be exploited by a malicious actor to completely take control of a targeted application. "The vulnerability is achieved through  CSRF  (cross-site request forgery) on the ubiquitous SCM service Kudu," Ermetic researcher Liv Matan  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By abusing the vulnerability, attackers can deploy malicious ZIP files containing a payload to the victim's Azure application." The Israeli cloud infrastructure security firm, which dubbed the shortcoming  EmojiDeploy , said it could further enable the theft of sensitive data and lateral movement to other Azure services. Microsoft has since fixed the vulnerability as of December 6, 2022, following responsible disclosure on October 26, 2022, in addition to awarding a bug bounty of $30,000. The Windows maker  describes  Kudu as the "engine behind a number of...

Four different Microsoft Azure services have been found vulnerable to server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attacks that could be exploited to gain unauthorized access to cloud resources. The security issues, which were discovered by Orca between October 8, 2022 and December 2, 2022 in Azure API Management, Azure Functions, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Digital Twins, have since been addressed by Microsoft. "The discovered Azure SSRF vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to scan local ports, find new services, endpoints, and sensitive files - providing valuable information on possibly vulnerable servers and services to exploit for initial entry and the location of sensitive information to target," Orca researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Two of the vulnerabilities affecting Azure Functions and Azure Digital Twins could be abused without requiring any authentication, enabling a threat actor to seize control of a server without eve...

Cybersecurity researchers from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  disclosed  details of a new security flaw affecting Microsoft's Service Fabric that could be exploited to obtain elevated permissions and seize control of all nodes in a cluster. The issue, which has been dubbed  FabricScape  ( CVE-2022-30137 ), could only be weaponized on containers that are configured to have  runtime access . It has been  remediated  as of June 14, 2022, in  Service Fabric 9.0 Cumulative Update 1.0 . Azure Service Fabric  is Microsoft's platform-as-a-service ( PaaS ) and a container orchestrator solution used to build and deploy microservices-based cloud applications across a cluster of machines. "The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control of the resource's host SF node and the entire cluster," Microsoft  said  as part of the coordinated disclosure process. "Though the bug exi...

Microsoft has incorporated additional improvements to address the recently disclosed  SynLapse  security vulnerability in order to meet comprehensive  tenant isolation   requirements  in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Pipelines. The latest safeguards include moving the shared integration runtimes to sandboxed ephemeral instances and using scoped tokens to prevent adversaries from using a client certificate to access other tenants' information. "This means that if an attacker could execute code on the  integration runtime , it is never shared between two different tenants, so no sensitive data is in danger," Orca Security said in a technical report detailing the flaw. In a statement shared with The Hacker News regarding the protections deployed, Microsoft said it fully mitigated different attack paths to the vulnerability across all integration runtime types. The tech giant stated that it "contained and closely monitored the backend certificate...