By Sergiu Gatlan September 18, 2023 11:18 AM
The Microsoft AI research division accidentally leaked dozens of terabytes of sensitive data starting in July 2020 while contributing open-source AI learning models to a public GitHub repository.

Almost three years later, this was discovered by cloud security firm Wiz whose security researchers found that a Microsoft employee inadvertently shared the URL for a misconfigured Azure Blob storage bucket containing the leaked information.

Microsoft linked the data exposure to using an excessively permissive Shared Access Signature (SAS) token, which allowed full control over the shared files. This Azure feature enables data sharing in a manner described by Wiz researchers as challenging to monitor and revoke.

When used correctly, Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens offer a secure means of granting delegated access to resources within your storage account.

This includes precise control over the client’s data access, specifying the resources they can interact with, defining their permissions concerning these resources, and determining the duration of the SAS token’s validity.

“Due to a lack of monitoring and governance, SAS tokens pose a security risk, and their usage should be as limited as possible. These tokens are very hard to track, as Microsoft does not provide a centralized way to manage them within the Azure portal,” Wiz warned today.

“In addition, these tokens can be configured to last effectively forever, with no upper limit on their expiry time. Therefore, using Account SAS tokens for external sharing is unsafe and should be avoided.”

38TB of private data exposed via Azure storage bucket

The Wiz Research Team found that besides the open-source models, the internal storage account also inadvertently allowed access to 38TB worth of additional private data.

The exposed data included backups of personal information belonging to Microsoft employees, including passwords for Microsoft services, secret keys, and an archive of over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages originating from 359 Microsoft employees.

In an advisory on Monday by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) team, Microsoft said that no customer data was exposed, and no other internal services faced jeopardy due to this incident.

Wiz reported the incident to MSRC on June 22nd, 2023, which revoked the SAS token to block all external access to the Azure storage account, mitigating the issue on June 24th, 2023.

“AI unlocks huge potential for tech companies. However, as data scientists and engineers race to bring new AI solutions to production, the massive amounts of data they handle require additional security checks and safeguards,” Wiz CTO & Cofounder Ami Luttwak told BleepingComputer.

“This emerging technology requires large sets of data to train on. With many development teams needing to manipulate massive amounts of data, share it with their peers or collaborate on public open-source projects, cases like Microsoft’s are increasingly hard to monitor and avoid.”

BleepingComputer also reported one year ago that, in September 2022, threat intelligence firm SOCRadar spotted another misconfigured Azure Blob Storage bucket belonging to Microsoft, containing sensitive data stored in files dated from 2017 to August 2022 and linked to over 65,000 entities from 111 countries.

SOCRadar also created a data leak search portal named BlueBleed that enables companies to find out if their sensitive data was exposed online.

Microsoft later added that it believed SOCRadar “greatly exaggerated the scope of this issue” and “the numbers.”

ARTICLE (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-leaks-38tb-of-private-data-via-unsecured-azure-storage/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Updated on: 12 September 2023
Vilius Petkauskas Deputy Editor

Millions of Facebook business accounts worldwide are being targeted with phishing messages, with a success rate of close to one in 70 victims infected, researchers say.

Attackers have been abusing Facebook’s Messenger platform to peddle millions of targeted phishing messages. According to cybersecurity firm Guardio, cybercrooks target highly rated marketplace sellers and, sometimes, large corporations with fake business inquiries.

For example, the fake message will start with a simple “hello” from a fake account. From the victim’s perspective, that’s just another potential customer.

The attackers’ message proceeds to inquire whether a product is still available. The only way to know which ‘product’ the fake client is talking about is to download a file.

This way, criminals try coaxing victims into downloading an RAR or ZIP archive containing a downloader for a Python-based infostealer. Attackers bypass automated scanners by encoding the content.

Legitimate business accounts are a lucrative target for threat actors. Stolen credentials can be quickly sold on forums for criminals who use them to peddle fake ads, malware, and scams.

Guardio researchers claim that while the attack method here is far from novel, the scale of the campaign is worrying. In only 30 days, attackers managed to target a staggering 7% of all Facebook business accounts, with one out of 250 victims downloading the malicious file.

The overall success rate for the campaign appears even higher, with Guardio claiming one in 70 targets have been infected in what it described as a staggering “success rate” for the criminal undertaking.

The precise reason for the discrepancy between these two sets of figures was not made clear by researchers.

“The threat actors hold an army of bots and fake Facebook accounts as well as a listing of millions of business accounts, pages, and managers – sending over 100k phishing messages a week to Facebook users around the world,” researchers claim.

By following the breadcrumbs left by the perpetrators, Guardio’s team deduced that the threat actors likely come from Vietnam: some of the commands are in Vietnamese and there are signs of the Coc Coc browser, popular in the South-east Asian nation.

Telegram/Discord API tokens left by attacker bots led researchers to a Telegram account named “MrTonyName,” which they believe to be one of those behind the attack.

To all techs suggestion keep Facebook off all lan networks, if marketing need it keep them in the DMZ zone

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Reported by Colin Domoney Must Read Article1-Aug-25-2023-01-31-48-4868-PM (APIsecurity.io) Great article

This week, we have news of the so-called GhostToken vulnerability, which could allow attackers to target Google Cloud users via the application marketplace. According to the researchers at Astrix who discovered the vulnerability, it could have allowed attackers to access the target account’s Google Drive, Calendar, Photos, Google Docs, Google Maps, and other Google Cloud Platform services. The researchers reported their findings to Google in June 2022, Google accepted them in August 2022, and in April 2023, they released a global patch to address the issue. Researchers also recommended that Google Cloud users regularly verify the application installed on their instance using the application management page on the Google Cloud portal.

The root cause of the vulnerability relates to the manner in which Google Cloud manages the lifecycle of an application and, specifically, how the application’s associated OAuth2 tokens are managed. The Google Cloud provides a 30-day grace period from the time an application is scheduled for deletion until the time it is permanently deleted. This grace period is to allow administrators an opportunity to recover resources deleted in error. While in the pending deletion state, the application (and its associated resources such as OAuth2 tokens) are invisible to platform users. The researchers at Astrix discovered that if an application’s pending deletion was canceled within the 30-day window, then the application and all its associated resources would be restored. They tested this with an OAuth2 token and discovered that this token still provided access to its original resources.

They describe how this delete/pending deletion/cancel deletion loop can be used to effectively hide a rogue application from the application management page of a user’s Google Cloud portal, using the following attack flow:

Article (https://apisecurity.io/issue-227-ghosttoken-on-google-cloud-gartner-on-zero-trust-api-authentication/?_hsmi=271737197&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9IfgoA5y7vMToerm-_dYKoPrJLUPxYuxFbM8t5n55gQjVb4nUIY4VGKXjHA1ZcwroZuWFiAt3S0OtpnQcQ2GvjR9SmAA)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Sounds like what could happen to Microsoft O365 and they have no liability (there are inexpensive backup solutions available)

By Bill Toulas August 23, 2023 10:40 AM (great reporting)
Danish hosting firms CloudNordic and AzeroCloud have suffered ransomware attacks, causing the loss of the majority of customer data and forcing the hosting providers to shut down all systems, including websites, email, and customer sites.

The two brands belong to the same company and stated that the attack unfolded last Friday night. However, today’s operational status remains highly problematic, with the firm’s IT teams only managing to restore some servers without any data.

Moreover, the firm’s statement clarifies that it won’t be paying the threat actors a ransom and has already engaged with security experts and reported the incident to the police.

Unfortunately, the system and data restoration process isn’t going smoothly, and CloudNordic says many of its customers have lost data that appears to be irrecoverable.

“Since we neither can nor wish to meet the financial demands of the criminal hackers for a ransom, CloudNordic’s IT team and external experts have been working intensively to assess the damage and determine what could be recovered,” reads CloudNordic’s statement (machine translated)

“Sadly, it has been impossible to recover more data, and the majority of our customers have consequently lost all their data with us.”

Both public notices include instructions on recovering websites and services from local backups or Wayback Machine archives.

Given the situation, the two hosting service providers previously recommended that heavily impacted customers move to other providers, such as Powernet and Nordicway.

Article (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hosting-firm-says-it-lost-all-customer-data-after-ransomware-attack/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

By Lawrence Abrams August 21, 2023 01:52 PM

A legitimate-looking ad for Amazon in Google search results redirects visitors to a Microsoft Defender tech support scam that locks up their browser.
Today, BleepingComputer was alerted to what appeared to be a valid advertisement for Amazon in the Google search results.
The advertisement shows Amazon’s legitimate URL, just like in the company’s typical search result, as shown below.

These tech support scams will automatically go into full-screen mode, making it hard to get out of the page without terminating the Google Chrome process.
However, when Chrome is terminated in this way, on the relaunch, it will prompt users to restore the previously closed pages, reopening the tech support scam.
A demonstration of today’s fake Amazon Google ad leading to the tech support scam site can be seen below

Google ads abused to distribute malware
BleepingComputer reached out to both Google and Amazon regarding this malvertising but has not received a response at the time of this publication.
Google advertisements have been heavily abused over the past year by other threat actors to distribute malware, which sometimes leads to ransomware attacks.
The threat actors would create replicas of legitimate sites but swap the download links to distribute trojanized programs that install malware.
The Royal ransomware operation also creates Google advertisements promoting malicious sites that install Cobalt Strike beacons. These beacons are used to provide initial access to corporate networks to conduct ransomware attacks.

Article (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sneaky-amazon-google-ad-leads-to-microsoft-support-scam/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient

By Sergiu Gatlan June 23, 2023 02:06 PM

Federal agencies ordered to patch by July 14th

Today, CISA ordered federal agencies to patch recently patched security vulnerabilities exploited as zero-days to deploy Triangulation spyware on iPhones via iMessage zero-click exploits.

The warning comes after Kaspersky published a report detailing a Triangulation malware component used in a campaign it tracks as “Operation Triangulation.”

Kaspersky says it found the spyware on iPhones belonging to employees in its Moscow office and from other countries. The attacks started in 2019 and are still ongoing, according to the company, and they use iMessage zero-click exploits that exploit the now-patched iOS zero-day bugs.

Russia’s FSB intelligence agency also claimed that Apple collaborated with the NSA to create a backdoor, facilitating the infiltration of iPhones in Russia. The FSB also said it allegedly found thousands of infected iPhones owned by Russian government officials and embassy staff in Israel, China, and NATO member nations.

“We have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will,” an Apple spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

“Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7,” the company said on Wednesday when describing the two Kernel and WebKit vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-32434 and CVE-2023-32435) exploited in the attacks.

The company also fixed a WebKit zero-day (CVE-2023-32439) this week that can let attackers gain arbitrary code execution on unpatched devices. This was also tagged by CISA today as an actively exploited flaw.

The list of affected devices is extensive, as the zero-day affects older and newer models, and it includes:

iPhone 8 and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 5th generation and later
iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation)
Macs running macOS Big Sur, Monterey, and Ventura
Apple Watch Series 4 and later, Apple Watch Series 3, Series 4, Series 5, Series 6, Series 7, and SE
On Thursday, Apple sent another round of threat notifications alerting customers they were targeted in state-sponsored attacks, one day after patching the zero-days exploited to deploy Triangulation spyware. However, it’s not clear to what incidents these new warnings are related to, according to CNN reporter Chris Bing.

Article Link (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cisa-orders-agencies-to-patch-iphone-bugs-abused-in-skspyware-attac/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”