Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Özfidan and Egemen Koçhisarlı with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service that was storing internal information relating to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems.
But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet.
Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations “could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use,” Yoleri said.
The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.
When reached by email, a spokesperson for Microsoft did not provide comment by the time of publication. In a statement shared after publication on Wednesday, Microsoft’s Jeff Jones told TechCrunch: “Though the credentials should not have been exposed, they were temporary, accessible only from internal networks, and disabled after testing. We thank our partners for responsibly reporting this issue.”
The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems.
But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet.
Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations “could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use,” Yoleri said.
The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.
When reached by email, a spokesperson for Microsoft did not provide comment by the time of publication. In a statement shared after publication on Wednesday, Microsoft’s Jeff Jones told TechCrunch: “Though the credentials should not have been exposed, they were temporary, accessible only from internal networks, and disabled after testing. We thank our partners for responsibly reporting this issue.”
