5 ms·

The linked story from 2023 has insane details. I’m pretty sure I had heard this before, but blocked it out due to some sort of normalcy bias. This plus the lat

The linked story from 2023 has insane details. I’m pretty sure I had heard this before, but blocked it out due to some sort of normalcy bias. This plus the latest State Dept. hack deserves pulling the CEO in front of Congress. It is known that there used to be a saying at Microsoft ~”Don’t get Bill pulled in front of Congress“ to avoid making bad decisions. That should be a thing again. > He also faulted Microsoft for waiting five years to refresh the signing key abused in the attacks, saying best practices are to rotate keys more frequently. He also criticized the company for allowing authentication tokens signed by an expired key, as was the case in the attack. https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-security-blasted-for-its-culture-of-toxic-obfuscation/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/microsoft-cloud-sec...

bigboy12 3y ago
Oh Microsoft has a security failure? Imagine that. Only 40 years of non stop security failures in its history. Why anyone would use Microsoft products is beyond me. You can only blame yourself. Fool me once shame on you, fool me for 40 years shame on me.
- Caligatio 3y ago
  I would love to know of a major tech company/product that has NOT had a security failure. This goes double for companies that provide hosting of services that hold juicy personal information.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Yep. I don’t understand why anyone ever uses Exchange; it was a joke 25 years ago, it’s still a joke.
- psd1 3y ago
  That's edgy without being interesting. I could replace you with a small script.
_8j50 3y ago
For key rotation, it may not be as simple as it sounds. I expect better from MS as well but for example, for on-prem AD, the krbtgt account should be rotated yearly but in practice, it carries a huge risk of outages for accounts that depend on it a lot for kerberos ticketing. I don't know the details but knowing MS, they may have copied over the key distribution design of kerberos to azure ad (hence the "skeleton key") and that maybe why they didn't rotate it frequently. For the latter issue you mentioned as well, it may be caused by fear of outages. The people implementing the design may have opted for a soft notification to the right people when the key expired but wasn't renewed instead of refusing to validate tokens and causing a global outage affecting every cloud service for every customer. Hindsight is always 20/20, but why didn't any government, organization or institution require a 3rd party audit of MS prior to this? And how special is MS in it's design compared to gcp or aws? What is MS's response to the findings? I have a pet-peeve for people that show up into an organization and find everything is done wrong without getting into the nuances and root causes so they can capitalize on the supposed failures for fame and glory. I don't know if that is the case here and certainly MS 's security track record and MSRC's response record is horrible but I am taking this report with a grain of salt. The government does need to twist MS's arm a lot in my opinion. I've done an objective comparison of cloud provider security capabilities and Azure's is the worst by a large margin, too much nickle and diming to charge customers more for security.
- consumer451 3y ago
  > it may be caused by fear of outages My only experience with anything close to this is website SSL certs. Back in the day, we used to renew certs from once a year, to as long as once every five years. It was somewhat normal for certs to expire and things to go awry. Then Let's Encrypt came along with certs that expire in 90 days. I believe the thinking was that a shorter period would ensure that systems and org processes were always ready for certificate regeneration, to avoid outages. My question is the case of Azure AD, is the design of a system where rotating a key would cause an outage, a bad design which is avoidable? note: Please let me know if I am using any incorrect terminology, or not understanding a basic concept, in the interest of learning.
  - 3y ago

bigboy12 3y ago

Oh Microsoft has a security failure? Imagine that. Only 40 years of non stop security failures in its history. Why anyone would use Microsoft products is beyond me. You can only blame yourself. Fool me once shame on you, fool me for 40 years shame on me.

Caligatio 3y ago
I would love to know of a major tech company/product that has NOT had a security failure. This goes double for companies that provide hosting of services that hold juicy personal information.
anonzzzies 3y ago
Yep. I don’t understand why anyone ever uses Exchange; it was a joke 25 years ago, it’s still a joke.
psd1 3y ago
That's edgy without being interesting. I could replace you with a small script.

_8j50 3y ago

For key rotation, it may not be as simple as it sounds. I expect better from MS as well but for example, for on-prem AD, the krbtgt account should be rotated yearly but in practice, it carries a huge risk of outages for accounts that depend on it a lot for kerberos ticketing. I don't know the details but knowing MS, they may have copied over the key distribution design of kerberos to azure ad (hence the "skeleton key") and that maybe why they didn't rotate it frequently. For the latter issue you mentioned as well, it may be caused by fear of outages. The people implementing the design may have opted for a soft notification to the right people when the key expired but wasn't renewed instead of refusing to validate tokens and causing a global outage affecting every cloud service for every customer. Hindsight is always 20/20, but why didn't any government, organization or institution require a 3rd party audit of MS prior to this? And how special is MS in it's design compared to gcp or aws? What is MS's response to the findings? I have a pet-peeve for people that show up into an organization and find everything is done wrong without getting into the nuances and root causes so they can capitalize on the supposed failures for fame and glory. I don't know if that is the case here and certainly MS 's security track record and MSRC's response record is horrible but I am taking this report with a grain of salt. The government does need to twist MS's arm a lot in my opinion. I've done an objective comparison of cloud provider security capabilities and Azure's is the worst by a large margin, too much nickle and diming to charge customers more for security.

consumer451 3y ago
> it may be caused by fear of outages My only experience with anything close to this is website SSL certs. Back in the day, we used to renew certs from once a year, to as long as once every five years. It was somewhat normal for certs to expire and things to go awry. Then Let's Encrypt came along with certs that expire in 90 days. I believe the thinking was that a shorter period would ensure that systems and org processes were always ready for certificate regeneration, to avoid outages. My question is the case of Azure AD, is the design of a system where rotating a key would cause an outage, a bad design which is avoidable? note: Please let me know if I am using any incorrect terminology, or not understanding a basic concept, in the interest of learning.
- 3y ago