All news with #microsoft azure tag

⚡ Microsoft has expanded its managed PostgreSQL offerings on Azure to support AI-native workloads by improving performance, scalability, and developer workflows. Azure Database for PostgreSQL now integrates with Microsoft Foundry for in-database LLM calls, offers DiskANN vector indexing for similarity search, and adds Parquet support for direct SQL access to object storage. Developers benefit from VS Code provisioning, Entra ID authentication, GitHub Copilot assistance, and a new Azure HorizonDB service for ultra-low-latency scale-out.

⚠️ A recent Pentera investigation discovered nearly 2,000 intentionally vulnerable security-testing web applications (DVWA, OWASP Juice Shop, Hackazon, bWAPP) exposed on the public internet, often running from overly privileged cloud accounts on AWS, GCP and Azure. Attackers exploited these instances to deploy crypto miners, install webshells and create persistence mechanisms, then pivot to sensitive cloud resources. Affected vendors including Cloudflare, F5 and Palo Alto Networks were notified and remediated issues. Pentera recommends inventories, isolation of test systems, enforcement of least-privilege IAM, and elimination of default credentials.

🔒 Unit 42 researchers discovered an Azure Private Endpoint DNS behavior that can unintentionally or deliberately produce denial-of-service conditions for Azure services. In several scenarios — accidental internal, accidental vendor, and malicious actor — linking a Private DNS zone to a virtual network can force name resolution to the private zone and fail when no A record exists, breaking connectivity to otherwise public endpoints. Microsoft documents a partial mitigation (fallback to internet); alternatives include manually adding DNS records and performing comprehensive discovery with Resource Graph.

🚀 Azure says its long-range datacenter strategy already accommodates NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, enabling rapid, large-scale rollouts across current Fairwater sites and planned AI superfactories. Microsoft highlights prior experience with Ampere, Hopper, GB200 and GB300 generations and claims its power, cooling, networking, and memory upgrades align with Rubin’s NVLink, ConnectX‑9, and HBM4 requirements. The post frames co-design work as reducing deployment risk and accelerating customer access to higher-performance inference and training at scale.

🤖 Microsoft announced a significant set of Azure Storage updates at Ignite 2025 and KubeCon to accelerate AI workloads, cloud-native applications, and migrations. Azure Blob Storage now targets exabyte-scale capacity and multi-tens of Tbps throughput, while Azure Managed Lustre (AMLFS 20 preview) offers 25 PiB namespaces, 512 GBps and HSM with auto-import/export. Additional enhancements — Premium Blob, Smart Tier, Azure Elastic SAN auto-scaling, Ultra Disk latency and cost improvements, Storage Discovery and Copilot, and expanded migration tooling — focus on low-latency inferencing, continuous GPU feeding for training, operational elasticity, and simplified data migrations.

☁️ Microsoft is expanding its U.S. cloud footprint with a new East US 3 region in the Greater Atlanta Metro, scheduled to open in early 2027, and by adding capacity and Availability Zones across multiple existing U.S. regions. The East US 3 region is designed for resilience with Availability Zones, support for advanced AI workloads, and sustainability goals including LEED Gold and water conservation. Microsoft is also increasing zone redundancy in North Central US, West Central US, and the US Government Arizona region to boost capacity, compliance, and mission readiness.

🔒 Microsoft is expanding Azure with on‑premises, edge, and hybrid options to deliver AI, resilience, and operational sovereignty. Azure Local provides integrated compute, storage, and networking on customer premises with GA features like Microsoft 365 Local and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, plus previews for disconnected operations and multi‑rack scale. Coupled with Azure IoT, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Arc management enhancements, the updates enable near‑real‑time analytics, secure device identity, and a unified control plane for distributed estates. The goal is to accelerate AI and analytics while preserving data residency, continuity, and compliance for regulated or mission‑critical environments.

🔐 Frenetik, a Maryland cybersecurity startup, emerged from stealth with a patented approach called Deception In-Use that continuously rotates real identities and resources across Microsoft Entra (M365), AWS, Google Cloud and on-prem environments. By routing critical change details through out-of-band channels accessible only to trusted parties, defenders retain accurate visibility while attackers operate on stale intelligence and are more likely to be funneled into decoys and honeypots.

☁️ Azure announces networking enhancements focused on security, resiliency, and AI-scale infrastructure. The update highlights zone-redundant NAT Gateway V2, expanded throughput options including ExpressRoute 400G and higher-performance VPN gateways, and advanced security features such as DNS Security Policy with Threat Intel and JWT validation in Application Gateway. Improvements to AKS container networking, Private Link Direct Connect, and Virtual WAN forced tunneling aim to simplify secure hybrid and AI deployments.

🛡️ Microsoft Azure said it blocked a record 15.72 Tbps DDoS attack tied to the Aisuru IoT botnet that surged to roughly 3.64 billion packets per second and targeted a single cloud endpoint in Australia. The attacker launched extremely high-rate UDP floods from over 500,000 source IPs with minimal spoofing and random source ports. Azure DDoS Protection automatically detected and mitigated the traffic without disrupting customer workloads, and Microsoft urged organizations to validate internet-facing protections ahead of peak periods, noting systemic IoT security gaps.

🛡 Microsoft automatically detected and mitigated a massive DDoS attack that peaked at 15.72 Tbps and roughly 3.64 billion packets per second against a single Australian endpoint. The traffic was attributed to a TurboMirai-class IoT botnet called AISURU, sourced from hundreds of thousands of compromised routers, cameras, and DVRs and launched from over 500,000 source IPs across multiple regions. Attackers used high-rate UDP floods with minimal source spoofing and random source ports, factors Microsoft said helped simplify traceback and provider enforcement. The incident underscores rising DDoS baselines as broadband speeds increase and IoT devices become more capable.

🔍 Microsoft researchers disclosed "Whisper Leak", a new side-channel that can infer conversation topics from encrypted, streamed language model responses by analyzing packet sizes and timings. The study demonstrates high classifier accuracy on a proof-of-concept sensitive topic and shows risk increases with more training data or repeated interactions. Industry partners including OpenAI, Mistral, Microsoft Azure, and xAI implemented streaming obfuscation mitigations that Microsoft validated as substantially reducing practical risk.

🔒 Enterprises continue to struggle with cloud misconfigurations that expose sensitive data, according to recent industry reporting and a Qualys study. The report cites a 28% breach rate tied to cloud or SaaS services over the past year and high misconfiguration rates across AWS (45%), GCP (63%) and Azure (70%). Experts blame permissive provider defaults, shadow IT and rapid business-driven deployments, and recommend controls such as MFA everywhere, private networking, encryption, least-privilege and infrastructure-as-code.

🔐 Matt Kiely of Huntress examines how the OAuth 2.0 device code flow enables phishing and highlights stark differences between Microsoft and Google. He walks through the device-code attack chain — generating a device code, social-engineering a user to enter it on a legitimate site, and polling the token endpoint to harvest access and refresh tokens. The analysis shows Azure’s implementation lets attackers control client_id and resource parameters to obtain powerful tokens, while Google’s implementation restricts device-code scopes and requires app controls that significantly limit abuse. Practical examples, cURL/Python snippets, and mitigation advice are included for defenders.

🔒 Amazon S3 Access Grants are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) and AWS Mexico (Central) Regions. The feature maps corporate identities—such as Microsoft Entra ID or AWS IAM principals—to S3 datasets, enabling administrators to automate and scale dataset access. This reduces manual policy overhead and helps ensure consistent, auditable permissions. Check the AWS Region Table and product page for regional availability and details.

⚠️ Microsoft is experiencing a global DNS outage that began about an hour ago, causing widespread access problems to Azure and Microsoft 365 services. Customers worldwide report they cannot log into corporate networks or reach portals including Azure, Intune, and the Exchange admin center, and some report the Azure Front Door CDN is also unavailable. Microsoft attributes the interruptions to DNS failures, warns of intermittent request failures and latency, and is reviewing telemetry while working on mitigation; it recommends programmatic access (PowerShell/CLI) when portals are unreachable.

🔹 Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, its third consecutive recognition. Azure’s adaptive approach—anchored by Azure Arc and Azure Local—delivers unified management, governance, and security across hybrid, edge, multicloud, and sovereign environments. These technologies enable services such as AKS, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, IoT operations and AI workloads, and Microsoft highlights customer outcomes and continued investment to broaden capabilities and compliance.

🚀 This Microsoft case study showcases how three organizations—Thomson Reuters, Hexure, and CallRevu—jumpstarted modernization by migrating on-premises SQL workloads to Azure SQL Managed Instance and complementary Azure services. The migrations reduced operational overhead, improved resiliency, and enabled faster deployments. Customers reported dramatic performance improvements, shorter migration windows, and a scalable foundation for AI-driven features and insights.

🔐 Microsoft Threat Intelligence analyzes how attackers target Azure Blob Storage across the full attack chain, emphasizing risks from exposed containers, compromised keys and SAS tokens, and abuse of automation such as Event Grid and Azure Functions. The blog maps these behaviors to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and illustrates tactics including data poisoning, covert C2 via metadata, and replication-based distribution. Microsoft recommends applying zero trust principles, enforcing least privilege with Microsoft Entra RBAC/ABAC, and enabling Defender for Storage with malware scanning, CSPM, and sensitive data discovery to detect, contain, and remediate storage-focused threats.

🚀 Microsoft Azure announced the first production-scale cluster using more than 4,600 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 (Blackwell Ultra) GPUs, co-engineered with NVIDIA to support OpenAI and other frontier AI workloads. The new ND GB300 v6 VMs are optimized for reasoning models, agentic systems, and multimodal generative AI, delivered on rack-scale systems with 72 GPUs per rack and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs. Microsoft says this infrastructure will shorten training from months to weeks and will scale to hundreds of thousands of Blackwell Ultra GPUs globally.