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A cybersecurity professional today demonstrated a long-known unpatched weakness in Microsoft's Azure cloud service by exploiting it to take control over Windows Live Tiles , one of the key features Microsoft built into Windows 8 operating system. Introduced in Windows 8, the Live tiles feature was designed to display content and notifications on the Start screen, allowing users to continuously pull up-to-date information from their favorite apps and websites. To make it easier for websites to offer their content as Live Tiles, Microsoft had a feature available on a subdomain of a separate domain, i.e., " notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com ," that allowed website admins to automatically convert their RSS feeds into a special XML format and use it as a meta tag on their websites. The service, which Microsoft had already shut down, was hosted on its own Azure Cloud platform with the subdomain configured/linked to an Azure account operated by the company. However,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft on Tuesday addressed a quartet of security flaws as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  that could be abused by adversaries to target Azure cloud customers and elevate privileges as well as allow for remote takeover of vulnerable systems. The list of flaws, collectively called OMIGOD by researchers from Wiz, affect a little-known software agent called Open Management Infrastructure that's automatically deployed in many Azure services - CVE-2021-38647  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-38648  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38645  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38649  (CVSS score: 7.0) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability Open Management Infrastructure ( OMI ) is an open-source  analogous equivalent  of Win...

Microsoft has patched a total of  74 flaws  in its software as part of the company's Patch Tuesday updates for August 2023, down from the voluminous 132 vulnerabilities the company fixed last month. This comprises six Critical, 67 Important, and one Moderate severity vulnerabilities. Released along with the security improvements are two defense-in-depth updates for Microsoft Office ( ADV230003 ) and the Memory Integrity System Readiness Scan Tool ( ADV230004 ). The updates are also in addition to 30 issues addressed by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since last month's Patch Tuesday edition and one side-channel flaw impacting certain processor models offered by AMD ( CVE-2023-20569  or  Inception ). ADV230003 concerns an already known security flaw tracked as  CVE-2023-36884 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Office and Windows HTML that has been actively exploited by the Russia-linked RomCom threat actor in attacks targeting Ukraine as...

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...

New evidence amidst the ongoing probe into the  espionage campaign  targeting SolarWinds has uncovered an unsuccessful attempt to compromise cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and access the company's email. The hacking endeavor was reported to the company by Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center on December 15, which identified a third-party reseller's Microsoft Azure account to be making "abnormal calls" to Microsoft cloud APIs during a 17-hour period several months ago. The undisclosed affected reseller's Azure account handles Microsoft Office licensing for its Azure customers, including CrowdStrike. Although there was an attempt by unidentified threat actors to read the emails, it was ultimately foiled as the firm does not use Microsoft's Office 365 email service, CrowdStrike  said . The incident comes in the wake of the  supply chain attack  of SolarWinds revealed earlier this month, resulting in the deployment of a covert backdoor (aka "Sunbu...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability in the protocol used by Microsoft Azure Active Directory that potential adversaries could abuse to stage undetected brute-force attacks. "This flaw allows threat actors to perform single-factor brute-force attacks against Azure Active Directory ( Azure AD ) without generating sign-in events in the targeted organization's tenant," researchers from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a report published on Wednesday. Azure Active Directory is Microsoft's enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution designed for single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication. It's also a core component of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), with capabilities to provide authentication to other applications via OAuth. The weakness resides in the  Seamless Single Sign-On  feature that allows employees to automatically sign in when using their corporate devices that...

Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for 138 security vulnerabilities spanning its product portfolio, although none of them have been listed as publicly known or under active attack. Of the 138 flaws, 30 are rated Critical, 104 are rated Important, three are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. As many as 61 vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation bugs, followed by 32 remote code execution, 15 information disclosure, 14 spoofing, eight denial-of-service, six security feature bypass, and two tampering flaws. The update list also includes a vulnerability that was patched by AMD ( CVE-2025-54518 , CVSS score: 7.3) this month. It relates to a case of improper isolation of shared resources within the CPU operation cache on Zen 2-based products that could allow an attacker to corrupt instructions executed at a different privilege level, potentially resulting in privilege escalation. The patches are also in addition to 127 security flaws that Google has add...

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...

It's Patch Tuesday once again…time for another round of security updates for the Windows operating system and other Microsoft products. This month Windows users and system administrators need to immediately take care of a total of 63 security vulnerabilities, of which 12 are rated critical, 49 important and one moderate and one low in severity. Two of the vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one flaw is reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple cybercriminal groups. Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Exploited by Cyber Criminals The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8589 , which is being exploited in the wild by multiple advanced persistent threat groups was first spotted and reported by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs. The flaw resides in the Win32k component (win32k.sys), which if exploited successfully, could allow a malicious program to execute arbitrary code...

Microsoft today rolling out its October 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates to fix a total of 59 vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems and related software, 9 of which are rated as critical, 49 are important, and one is moderate in severity. What’s good about this month’s patch update is that after a very long time, none of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is being listed as publicly known or under active attack. Moreover, there is no roll-up patch for Adobe Flash Player bundled in Windows update for this month. Besides this, Microsoft has also put up a notice as a reminder for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users, warning them that the extended support for these two operating systems is about to end in the next two months and that they will no longer receive updates as of January 14, 2020. Two of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month are remote code execution flaws in the VBScript engine, and both exist in the way VBS...

Get your update caps on. Microsoft today released its monthly Patch Tuesday update for September 2019, patching a total of 79 security vulnerabilities in its software, of which 17 are rated critical, 61 as important, and one moderate in severity. Two of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as "publicly known" at the time of release, one of which is an elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE-2019-1235) in Windows Text Service Framework (TSF), more likely related to a 20-year-old flaw Google security researcher disclosed last month . Two other vulnerabilities patched this month are reported as being actively exploited in the wild by hackers, both are privilege elevation flaws—one resides in the Windows operating system and the other in Windows Common Log File System Driver. Besides these, Microsoft has released patches for four critical RCE vulnerabilities in Windows built-in Remote Desktop Client application that could enabl...