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

Presented at TROOPERS18 (2018), March 14, 2018, 1:30 p.m. (Unknown duration).

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.


Presenters:

  • Nate Warfield
    Nate Warfield is a Senior Security Program Manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center. He spent nearly 20 years designing, building and troubleshooting enterprise & carrier-grade networks for Fortune 500 companies while simultaneously moonlighting as a Grey Hat. He learned BASIC at 8 years old, hacked his first BBS over 2400 baud dialup at 13 and has dabbled with everything from reverse engineering and network exploitation to breaking Magstripe/RFID/NFC and bricking Bluetooth devices. In his current role he manages security reports for vulnerabilities which affect Azure Cloud, Hyper-V and Windows server products. He devotes his spare cycles to hunting hacked virtual machines in Azure, adding functionality to OSINT tools like Shodan and teaching others how to Hunt Threats Like A Boss. When he's not working, Nate enjoys snowboarding, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, attempting to be a Michelin starred chef and spending time with his family.

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