August 27, 2021

Microsoft warned thousands of its cloud computing customers Thursday, cautioning some of the world’s biggest companies that hackers could have the ability to read, modify or even delete their most important databases.

The vulnerability was discovered in Microsoft Azure’s flagship Cosmos DB database. A team of researchers from security company Wiz found that it was able to access keys that control access to databases of thousands of companies.

Since Microsoft cannot change these keys itself, it has emailed customers asking them to make new ones. Microsoft paid Wiz $40,000 to report the vulnerability.

Reports say that even customers who were not notified by Microsoft could have had their keys swiped by drone agents who granted them access until those keys were changed. Microsoft only notified customers whose keys were visible this month when Wiz was working on the issue.

Microsoft said potentially affected customers received a notification from them but did not elaborate further.

The revelation comes after months of bad security news for the tech giant.

Microsoft was attacked by the same alleged Russian government hackers who infiltrated SolarWinds and stole Microsoft source code. In addition, hackers launched an attack on Exchange email servers while a patch was being developed.

Although cloud attacks are less common, they can do more damage when they happen, and many of these attacks are never made public.

Microsoft’s email to customers said there was no evidence that the vulnerability had been exploited.

For more information, read the original story in Reuters.