Displaying items by tag: Microsoft

In May of 2023 a few sensitive accounts reported to Microsoft that their environments appeared to be compromised. Due to the nature of these accounts, Microsoft dove in and discovered that an expired Consumer Microsoft Account Singing Key had been used to gain access to these tenants. It was more than a bit embarrassing as the list included environments that appear to have been related to their Government Cloud Computing tenants, fortunately on the low side (non-classified). Microsoft quickly responded and says they expelled the threat actor while removing the possibility of using that key again (they identified the thumbprint of the key used).

After a recent attack on Federal Civilian Execute Branch (FCEB) Agencies by an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) group currently suspected of being a nation-state group from China, (whew that was a long start), It has come to the attention of some cloud researchers that these signing keys are not just useful for attacking Exchange Online. According to cloud security company Wiz these MSA Keys can be used to forge tokens for anything that relies on Microsoft Azure AD (Entra ID) Identity services.

Last week Microsoft, the FBI, and CISA made disclosed several attacks on Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and other targets of a campaign that appeared to be driven by a new threat group out of China. The attack we detected and tracked down using internal logging available to the GCC low-side tenants and with the help of Microsoft. Fortunately, GCC (Government Cloud Computing) Low Side is not supposed to contain or pass any classified information. It is intended to be used by government agencies and contractors that do not need or have authorization to access anything more than routine sensitive information. This does not reduce the seriousness of the attack and does beg the question on how well the tenants were secured by the cybersecurity teams involved, but at least nothing National Security related was compromised.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Framework Interface) was the replacement for the old BIOS (Basic Input Output System). It was intended as an improvement to the underlying systems on a motherboard (also called mainboard) the motherboard controls communication between all components connected to it from CPUs, to memory, to GPUs, disk or solid-state drives, network cards… you get the picture. The old BIOS was limited and also susceptible to compromise in a number of rather simple ways. By moving to UEFI systems could become more complex without issues potential hardware conflicts, the UEFI structure was also much faster than the BIOS system meaning that as overall computing increased in speed the underlying controls for different components was up to the task.

It seems that an unnamed FCEB agency had their Outlook Web Access (Exchange Online) environment compromised by a new threat group that is current being attributed to China. The attack and the group were disclosed by CISA and the FBI. With the detection of the FCEB email compromise, Microsoft also identified a much larger espionage campaign involving the newly identified group which includes some 20+ organizations. The timing of the attack is concerning due to it coinciding with a recent NATO meeting.

There is nothing like an unresolved security flaw in a major product. Especially when the flaw is one that the developer knows about but does not consider important enough to fix in a timely manner. If the flaw is in a commonly used product, it is even better. In this case we are talking about a flaw we covered back on the 23rd of June. This is a bug that can allow an attacker to mimic an internal sender to get around file handling from external senders. In our opinion, it is significant, but Microsoft has no plans to remediate it any time soon. I guess they have other things on their plate like Privacy Investigations in the EU (Over Teams and Office) and the pending Activision/Blizzard deal in court in the US.

So, it seems that under direct questioning Microsoft has been forced to admit that cloud gaming is not as big of a deal as they have been saying it is. We have long held that their generous 10-year cloud licensing deal for cloud gaming was not an honest attempt at competition. After all cloud gaming represents a little less than 1% of the total gaming market. Now Sarah Bond has admitted that it is not a popular option and that it is most commonly used as a feature for Microsoft consoles.

Unless you have been living under a rock or just do not care about gaming at all, you have probably heard a lot about the Microsoft Activision merger/acquisition. The deal, one of the largest in history, is a monster. Microsoft wants to buy, lock, stock and barrel, the Activision Blizzard game development company for a whopping $68.7 Billion (with a “b”). The deal would give Microsoft complete control over everything Activision/Blizzard. Now for some this might not be a bad thing if you look at it from just a game perspective or if you are just a PC gamer. The problem comes when you get into how games are really developed and how game developers work with component and console makers to ensure their games work properly.

In our coverage of the Microsoft Activision/Blizzard deal we have often wondered why so many of the groups that approved the deal, and one that opposed it, focused only on cloud gaming. We saw the UK say that the deal was bad for cloud gaming while others stated that a 10-year licensing deal for cloud gaming services that Microsoft agreed to made everything all better. As we looked over the approvals and oppositions this odd focus on what represents less than 1% of the gaming market seemed so out of place that started to feel that the opposition was just a token resistance and the deal (which is a bad thing) was just going to get rubber stamped.

Microsoft’s Azure AD, the cloud-based flavor of the on-premises service is an interesting construct. On the surface you think that it has some decent protections enabled by default. The sad truth of the matter is that this is not the case and many options for security are very lacking until you hit much higher security levels. If you add to this equation the likelihood of vulnerabilities and other flaws that can allow an attacker to bypass the security options that are already there it is a bit of a mess. This wonderful thought is what brings us to today’s flaw. According to security researchers, there is a flaw in how Microsoft Azure AD processes its implementation of OAuth (Open Authentication).