Authored by Amit Yoran, Chairman & CEO, Tenable
Last week, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking that they hold Microsoft accountable for a repeated pattern of negligent cybersecurity practices, which has enabled Chinese espionage against the United States government. According to data from Google Project Zero, Microsoft products have accounted for an aggregate 42.5% of all zero days discovered since 2014.
Microsoft’s lack of transparency applies to breaches, irresponsible security practices and to vulnerabilities, all of which expose their customers to risks they are deliberately kept in the dark about.
In March 2023, a member of Tenable’s Research team was investigating Microsoft’s Azure platform and related services. The researcher discovered an issue which would enable an unauthenticated attacker to access cross-tenant applications and sensitive data, such as authentication secrets. To give you an idea of how bad this is, our team very quickly discovered authentication secrets to a bank. They were so concerned about the seriousness and the ethics of the issue that we immediately notified Microsoft.
Did Microsoft quickly fix the issue that could effectively lead to the breach of multiple customers' networks and services? Of course not. They took more than 90 days to implement a partial fix – and only for new applications loaded in the service.
That means that as of today, the bank I referenced above is still vulnerable, more than 120 days since we reported the issue, as are all of the other organizations that had launched the service prior to the fix. And, to the best of our knowledge, they still have no idea they are at risk and therefore can’t make an informed decision about compensating controls and other risk mitigating actions. Microsoft claims that they will fix the issue by the end of September, four months after we notified them. That’s grossly irresponsible, if not blatantly negligent. We know about the issue, Microsoft knows about the issue, and hopefully threat actors don’t.
Cloud providers have long espoused the shared responsibility model. That model is irretrievably broken if your cloud vendor doesn’t notify you of issues as they arise and apply fixes openly.
What you hear from Microsoft is “just trust us,” but what you get back is very little transparency and a culture of toxic obfuscation. How can a CISO, board of directors or executive team believe that Microsoft will do the right thing given the fact patterns and current behaviors? Microsoft’s track record puts us all at risk. And it’s even worse than we thought.
