> Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts [...]
> The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services.
It’s technically correct but misleading: the products are not inherently flawed but their lack of MFA means the product wasn’t used in a secure configuration. I hope that this is held against them by regulators or in court because they’ve known and even advocated for FIDO-2/WebAuthn for years and there’s no excuse for not requiring them by policy.
My point is that if one can guess the password on a random test box and through that gain access to critical internal systems, you have lost the right to call your system "not vulnerable".
Well, your "legacy non production test tenant" can be opened by just guessing passwords, and it allows access to "very much in use production non-test" tenants, then you could say MS has a vulnerability. It may not be a buffer overflow, but it is a vulnerability nonetheless.
Yes, and I think most people would consider it a vulnerability if an authentication system doesn't rate-limit or otherwise slow/stop "password spray" attacks.
You can rate limit individual users but password spray attacks use a large number of accounts to remain undetected in a authentication system used by an even more users.
> The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services.
Hmm...