A security researcher has pointed out today that Microsoft has a problem in managing its thousands of subdomains, many of which can be hijacked and used for attacks against users, its employees, or for showing spammy content.
The issue has been brought up today by Michel Gaschet, a security researcher and a developer for NIC.gp.
In an interview with ZDNet, Gaschet said that during the past three years, he's been reporting subdomains with misconfigured DNS records to Microsoft, but the company has either been ignoring reports or silently securing some subdomains, but not all.
RESEARCHER: ONLY 5%-10% GOT FIXED
Gaschet says he reported 21 msn.com subdomains that were vulnerable to hijacks to Microsoft in 2017 [1, 2], and then another 142 misconfigured microsoft.com subdomains in 2019 [1, 2].
BLAME DNS MISCONFIGURATIONS
Gaschet told ZDNet the OS maker usually fixes big subdomains, like cloud.microsoft.com and account.dpedge.microsoft.com, but leaves the other subdomains exposed to hijacks.
But until now, these misconfigurations have never caused Microsoft any problems or headaches, despite being an attractive attack surface.
Luckily, no dangerous threat groups have noticed this problem.
Sadly, others have.
Today, Gaschet pointed out on Twitter that at least one spam group has figured out they could hijack Microsoft's subdomains and boost their spammy content by hosting it on a reputable domain
Gaschet says he spotted ads for Indonesian poker casinos on at least four legitimate Microsoft subdomains. These include portal.ds.microsoft.com, perfect10.microsoft.com, ies.global.microsoft.com, and blog-ambassadors.microsoft.com.
The spammy ads are still live at the time of writing.
Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-has-a-subdomain-hijacking-problem/
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