• by Ray Schultz , October 20, 2022

Microsoft was breached in September and sensitive customer information was exposed, including email addresses and email content as well as names, company names and phone numbers -- although Microsoft claims there was no sign that customer accounts were compromised.  

There are varying reports on this incident and its scope. Microsoft writes in a post that “Security researchers at SOCRadar informed Microsoft on September 24, 2022, of a misconfigured Microsoft endpoint.” 

It continues that this “misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers, such as the planning or potential implementation and provisioning of Microsoft services.” 

Microsoft determined that the problem was caused by “an unintentional misconfiguration on an endpoint that is not in use across the Microsoft ecosystem and was not the result of a security vulnerability.”

Moreover, Microsoft says SOCRadar has “greatly exaggerated the scope of this issue.  Our in-depth investigation and analysis of the data set shows duplicate information, with multiple references to the same emails, projects, and users.”  

The firm continues: “We take this issue very seriously and are disappointed that SOCRadar exaggerated the numbers involved in this issue even after we highlighted their error."

SOCRadar reported: "On September 24, 2022, SOCRadar’s built-in Cloud Security Module detected a misconfigured Azure Blob Storage maintained by Microsoft containing sensitive data from a high-profile cloud provider.”

Bleeping Reporter states that, in Microsoft’s server, “SOCRadar claims to have found 2.4 TB of data containing sensitive information, with more than 335,000 emails, 133,000 projects, and 548,000 exposed users discovered while analyzing the leaked files until now.” 

SOCRadar provides a search portal called BlueBleed that allows firms to determine whether their sensitive information was exposed with the leak, Bleeping Computer reports. 

Microsoft criticized SOCRadar’s search tool that it claims is “not in the best interest of ensuring customer privacy or security and potentially exposing them to unnecessary risk.”