Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub. In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data. Readers of the GitHub repository, which provided open source code and AI models for image recognition, were instructed to download the models from an Azure Storage URL. However, Wiz found that this URL was configured to grant permissions on the entire storage account, exposing additional private data by mistake. This data included 38 terabytes of sensitive information, including the personal backups of two Microsoft employees’ personal computers. The data also contained other sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from hundreds of Microsoft employees. The URL, which had exposed this data since 2020, was also misconfigured to allow “full control” rather than “read-only” permissions, according to Wiz, which meant anyone who knew where to look could potentially delete, replace and inject malicious content into them.
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