Microsoft forewarned its Azure cloud computing customers that a defect discovered by security researchers would have most likely let hackers access their data.
Microsoft stated that it had fixed the flaw reported by Palo Alto Networks. A blog post from its security response team said it had no evidence that the malicious hackers had abused the technique. It is reported that it had informed some customers to change their login details as a safeguard. The blog post followed questions from Reuters about the techniques described by Palo Alto. Microsoft did not answer any of the questions, including whether it was certain that no other data had been obtained.
Ariel Zelivansky, Palo Alto’s researcher told Reuters his team had been able to break out of Azure’s widely used system for so-called containers which store programs for users. In an interview, Ariel Zelivansky further stated that the Azure containers used code had not been updated to patch a known exposure. As a result, the Palo Alto team was able to eventually get full control of a clump that included containers from other users.
A longtime container security expert Ian Coldwater who reviewed Palo Alto’s work at Reuter’s request stated that “This is the first attack on a cloud provider to use container escape to control other accounts”. In July Palo Alto reported the issue to Microsoft.
Zelivansky said that his team had taken efforts for months to agree that the malicious hacker no doubt had not used the same technique in an actual attack. However, Microsoft revealed the report as the second major flaw in as many weeks. Security experts at Wiz described a database defect that would allow one customer to change one’s data by the end of August.
Microsoft’s avowal, in both arenas, laid its emphasis on those clients in some way might have been affected by the researchers themselves, instead of putting everyone at risk by its code. According to the statement of Microsoft on Wednesday, Coldwater said that the issue manifested a failure to patches in a given frame of time, something Microsoft has often blamed its customers for. He further emphasized the importance of keeping the code updated and a lot of things that made this attack possible would no longer be possible with modern software.