4 ms·

As someone who is greatly motivated to moving off Azure (to onprem, not to another cloud), do you know of any good collection of Azure security issues I could u

by Mossy9 2y ago

As someone who is greatly motivated to moving off Azure (to onprem, not to another cloud), do you know of any good collection of Azure security issues I could use as 'ammunition'? Would be greatly appreciated! UPD: note to self - this seems like a good resource https://www.cloudvulndb.org/results https://www.cloudvulndb.org/results

redrove 2y ago
I have some notes somewhere but unfortunately they don't have citations, these are just some of the vulns they've had in the last couple years: • Storm-0558 Breach (2023): Chinese hackers exploited a leaked signing key from a crash dump to access U.S. government emails, affecting 60,000+ State Department communications • Azure OpenAI Service Exploitation (2024): Hackers bypassed AI guardrails using stolen credentials to generate illicit content, leading to Microsoft lawsuits against developers in Iran, UK, and Vietnam • CVE-2025-21415 (CVSS 9.9): Spoofing vulnerability in Azure AI Face Service allowed authentication bypass and privilege escalation • CVE-2023-36052: Azure CLI logging flaw exposed plaintext credentials in CI/CD pipelines, risking sensitive data leakage • Azurescape (2022): Container escape vulnerability enabled cross-tenant access in Azure Container Instances, discovered by Palo Alto Networks • ChaosDB (2022): Wiz researchers exploited CosmosDB’s Jupyter Notebook integration to access thousands of customer databases including Fortune 500 companies • Executive Account Takeover Campaign (2024): Phishing campaign compromised 500+ executive accounts via Azure collaboration tools with MFA manipulation If your company or workplace is considering migrating from cloud to on-prem or from one cloud to another, I do this professionally btw, feel free to reach out at this temporary email and we can chat: pale.pearl2178 at fastmail.com (to prevent my real email being scraped from HN).
- Mossy9 2y ago
  Great, thanks! For me it's just a distant dream now, but I bet business will be booming for you in the coming years, especially if you're located in Europe ;)
- medlazik 2y ago
  This list of vulns nobody was ever bothered with except for 1 (Storm-0558) doesn't prove your ridiculously sensational comment above
p_ing 2y ago
Security issues/CVEs should never be used as a motivation to get off of a particular platform, otherwise we'd never use Linux, macOS, or Windows (I hope you're a fan of OpenBSD... sometimes). If these issues remain unfixed after being disclosed, or a pattern of fixes that took much longer than you feel they should have, that's valuable ammunition as it shows the organization isn't responsive to security issues.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  I agree you shouldn't write off any platform/software/etc based solely on the number of vulnerabilities. I also agree that how responsive they are to fixing things is a factor to consider. But I think that's only _a_ factor. Take something like a container escape vulnerability. We could have Vendor A where they're just running containerd on a bunch of hosts on a single network segment and throwing everyone's containers at it so a container escape vulnerability essentially gets you access to everything any of their customers are running. Where-as Vendor B segments running containers into VMs, so a container escape vulnerability means you can only access your own data. Not great because if one container is compromised that gives them a path into the rest of your workloads, but at least I know they're maintaining a pretty solid wall between tenants. Then there's Vendor C that actually runs containers using some micro-VM framework so each container is running fully isolated by a hypervisor with a fully separate emulated network stack, etc so the escape really gets them no more access than they had inside the container. A pattern of issues like Vendor A is, well, a pattern. A series of issues that show their systems are fundamentally not designed for proper isolation between tenants and are lacking defense-in-depth measures to mitigate the fallout of the inevitable security issues is a very good reason to write off Vendor A regardless of how quickly they respond to the issues. I'm not going to go back and review all the Azure issues, but my recollection from the few writeups I've read definitely paint a picture of a lot more "Vendor A" type issues than I'd be comfortable with.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    All of this presupposes that whatever you implement yourself will be more secure and/or that you have the budget to even begin to approach the same level of security. I’ve been there, done that, and was amazed how the security aspects only rapidly escalated to many millions of dollars and an ongoing cost also in the million or two range! Think of this like a CEO: they’re less worried about Chinese hackers and more worried about about insider attacks. They’re much more common and do way more financial damage. The cloud automatically provides separation of roles because an entirely different vendor is in charge of the lower layers, such as networking and storage. Do you have any idea how hard it is to prevent a smart sysadmin from simply copying all data to a USB drive and walking out of the building with it? That’s much harder when everything is on a managed hosting platform and no single person can access all accounts / subscriptions.
HideousKojima 2y ago
Not strictly security, but there are several long-standing issues with Azure DevOps build pipelines and Artifacts feeds. Using a private artifact feed in your pipeline inexplicably adds minutes to the amount of time it takes to restore packages. And publishing C# NuGet packages together with the source/symbol files is a poorly supported and poorly documented mess (it doesn't help that NuGet support in the dotnet CLI is missing support for important and long requested features only available by using the full fat NuGet client or MSBuild directly).
rubiquity 2y ago
Azure requires that you use SHA-1 RSA private keys for initially connecting to VMs.
Spooky23 2y ago
They’ve improved a lot, but their Achilles heel used to be that the only way they could achieve more challenging compliance requirements was to have multiple segmented clouds. With Office 365, for example, they had at least 4 government clouds, some of which used shared infrastructure with Azure commercial, but had different data residency or employee requirements. They have thousands of employees monitored by all of the states as a condition of working on those clouds, for example. Technical controls are similar, but the weak point are things that can cross cloud boundaries. One of the Chinese breaches of US government systems were caused by a PKI vulnerability that allowed the attacker to pivot from a dev environment to a federal cloud instance.

by Mossy9 2y ago

redrove 2y ago

I have some notes somewhere but unfortunately they don't have citations, these are just some of the vulns they've had in the last couple years: • Storm-0558 Breach (2023): Chinese hackers exploited a leaked signing key from a crash dump to access U.S. government emails, affecting 60,000+ State Department communications • Azure OpenAI Service Exploitation (2024): Hackers bypassed AI guardrails using stolen credentials to generate illicit content, leading to Microsoft lawsuits against developers in Iran, UK, and Vietnam • CVE-2025-21415 (CVSS 9.9): Spoofing vulnerability in Azure AI Face Service allowed authentication bypass and privilege escalation • CVE-2023-36052: Azure CLI logging flaw exposed plaintext credentials in CI/CD pipelines, risking sensitive data leakage • Azurescape (2022): Container escape vulnerability enabled cross-tenant access in Azure Container Instances, discovered by Palo Alto Networks • ChaosDB (2022): Wiz researchers exploited CosmosDB’s Jupyter Notebook integration to access thousands of customer databases including Fortune 500 companies • Executive Account Takeover Campaign (2024): Phishing campaign compromised 500+ executive accounts via Azure collaboration tools with MFA manipulation If your company or workplace is considering migrating from cloud to on-prem or from one cloud to another, I do this professionally btw, feel free to reach out at this temporary email and we can chat: pale.pearl2178 at fastmail.com (to prevent my real email being scraped from HN).

Mossy9 2y ago
Great, thanks! For me it's just a distant dream now, but I bet business will be booming for you in the coming years, especially if you're located in Europe ;)
medlazik 2y ago
This list of vulns nobody was ever bothered with except for 1 (Storm-0558) doesn't prove your ridiculously sensational comment above

p_ing 2y ago

Security issues/CVEs should never be used as a motivation to get off of a particular platform, otherwise we'd never use Linux, macOS, or Windows (I hope you're a fan of OpenBSD... sometimes). If these issues remain unfixed after being disclosed, or a pattern of fixes that took much longer than you feel they should have, that's valuable ammunition as it shows the organization isn't responsive to security issues.

nucleardog 2y ago
I agree you shouldn't write off any platform/software/etc based solely on the number of vulnerabilities. I also agree that how responsive they are to fixing things is a factor to consider. But I think that's only _a_ factor. Take something like a container escape vulnerability. We could have Vendor A where they're just running containerd on a bunch of hosts on a single network segment and throwing everyone's containers at it so a container escape vulnerability essentially gets you access to everything any of their customers are running. Where-as Vendor B segments running containers into VMs, so a container escape vulnerability means you can only access your own data. Not great because if one container is compromised that gives them a path into the rest of your workloads, but at least I know they're maintaining a pretty solid wall between tenants. Then there's Vendor C that actually runs containers using some micro-VM framework so each container is running fully isolated by a hypervisor with a fully separate emulated network stack, etc so the escape really gets them no more access than they had inside the container. A pattern of issues like Vendor A is, well, a pattern. A series of issues that show their systems are fundamentally not designed for proper isolation between tenants and are lacking defense-in-depth measures to mitigate the fallout of the inevitable security issues is a very good reason to write off Vendor A regardless of how quickly they respond to the issues. I'm not going to go back and review all the Azure issues, but my recollection from the few writeups I've read definitely paint a picture of a lot more "Vendor A" type issues than I'd be comfortable with.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  All of this presupposes that whatever you implement yourself will be more secure and/or that you have the budget to even begin to approach the same level of security. I’ve been there, done that, and was amazed how the security aspects only rapidly escalated to many millions of dollars and an ongoing cost also in the million or two range! Think of this like a CEO: they’re less worried about Chinese hackers and more worried about about insider attacks. They’re much more common and do way more financial damage. The cloud automatically provides separation of roles because an entirely different vendor is in charge of the lower layers, such as networking and storage. Do you have any idea how hard it is to prevent a smart sysadmin from simply copying all data to a USB drive and walking out of the building with it? That’s much harder when everything is on a managed hosting platform and no single person can access all accounts / subscriptions.

HideousKojima 2y ago

Not strictly security, but there are several long-standing issues with Azure DevOps build pipelines and Artifacts feeds. Using a private artifact feed in your pipeline inexplicably adds minutes to the amount of time it takes to restore packages. And publishing C# NuGet packages together with the source/symbol files is a poorly supported and poorly documented mess (it doesn't help that NuGet support in the dotnet CLI is missing support for important and long requested features only available by using the full fat NuGet client or MSBuild directly).

rubiquity 2y ago

Azure requires that you use SHA-1 RSA private keys for initially connecting to VMs.

Spooky23 2y ago

They’ve improved a lot, but their Achilles heel used to be that the only way they could achieve more challenging compliance requirements was to have multiple segmented clouds. With Office 365, for example, they had at least 4 government clouds, some of which used shared infrastructure with Azure commercial, but had different data residency or employee requirements. They have thousands of employees monitored by all of the states as a condition of working on those clouds, for example. Technical controls are similar, but the weak point are things that can cross cloud boundaries. One of the Chinese breaches of US government systems were caused by a PKI vulnerability that allowed the attacker to pivot from a dev environment to a federal cloud instance.