All Your Cloud Are Belong To Us - Hunting Compromise in Azure

As part of the Microsoft Security Response Center my responsibilities include keeping Azure secure. In this talk I’ll discuss how I found thousands of compromised customers in the Azure Cloud and the challenges faced by cloud providers protecting customers from both hackers and themselves.

MongoDB, Redis, Elastic, Hadoop, SMBv1, IIS6.0, Samba. What do they all have in common? Thousands of them were pwned. In Azure. In 2017.

Attackers have shifted tactics, incorporated nation-state leaked tools and are leveraging ransomware to monetize their attacks. Cloud networks are prime targets; the DMZ is gone, the firewall doesn’t exist and customers may not realize they’ve exposed insecure services to the Internet until it’s too late.

In this talk I’ll discuss hunting, finding and remediating compromised customer systems in Azure - a non-trivial task with 1.59million exposed hosts and counting. Remediating system compromise is only the first stage so we’ll also cover how we applied the lessons learned to proactively secure Azure Marketplace.

Finally, I will present research I’ve done into the default security configuration of Azure Marketplace images and present a call to action for teams working on Azure security offerings.