Here’s another story from the “this is potentially bad” department. Researchers have discovered a critical security vulnerability in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) configurations that exposes sensitive application credentials, providing attackers with unprecedented access to cloud environments.
Commenting on this is Martin Jartelius, CTO at Outpost24:
“Security findings are sometimes overstated in coverage. In this case, the penetration testers’ original report was honest and factual, but the article misrepresents it and even links to an unrelated Azure AD vulnerability from 2024 instead of the testers’ actual write-up. The attack is straightforward:
- A website or system exposes appsettings.json, which contains tokens similar to API keys or stored credentials.
- The exposed application already has permissions granted by the organization.
- An attacker can use those credentials.
This is not a vulnerability in Active Directory, permissions management, or the application itself. It is a misconfiguration that exposes sensitive files on a webserver, fileshare, or code repository.
The case does highlight the risk of over-permissioned applications in Azure AD. Tools requesting broad access to calendars or email put sensitive data at risk, where more granular permissions (such as availability only) would not. Organizations should require approval for new apps, minimize their number, and only allow them when clearly justified.
And most importantly: never leave passwords or tokens in files that can be accessed publicly. That is basic security hygiene.”
Misconfigurations are as bad as outright vulnerabilities. Thus you have to make sure that you don’t leave out the red carpet for threat actors because you did not set your environment up with security in mind.
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This entry was posted on September 3, 2025 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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An Azure AD Misconfiguration Can Potentially Get You Pwned
Here’s another story from the “this is potentially bad” department. Researchers have discovered a critical security vulnerability in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) configurations that exposes sensitive application credentials, providing attackers with unprecedented access to cloud environments.
Commenting on this is Martin Jartelius, CTO at Outpost24:
“Security findings are sometimes overstated in coverage. In this case, the penetration testers’ original report was honest and factual, but the article misrepresents it and even links to an unrelated Azure AD vulnerability from 2024 instead of the testers’ actual write-up. The attack is straightforward:
This is not a vulnerability in Active Directory, permissions management, or the application itself. It is a misconfiguration that exposes sensitive files on a webserver, fileshare, or code repository.
The case does highlight the risk of over-permissioned applications in Azure AD. Tools requesting broad access to calendars or email put sensitive data at risk, where more granular permissions (such as availability only) would not. Organizations should require approval for new apps, minimize their number, and only allow them when clearly justified.
And most importantly: never leave passwords or tokens in files that can be accessed publicly. That is basic security hygiene.”
Misconfigurations are as bad as outright vulnerabilities. Thus you have to make sure that you don’t leave out the red carpet for threat actors because you did not set your environment up with security in mind.
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This entry was posted on September 3, 2025 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.