Microsoft has fixed a flaw that leaked company files and employee data online.
Researchers from cybersecurity firm SOCRadar discovered a server on Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud computing platform, that was open to the public and contained information pertaining to its Bing search engine.
Passwords and other credentials belonging to employees were also exposed, which could have given hackers a golden opportunity to breach other databases belonging to the tech giant.
Same mistakes
The database the researchers found was not protected with a password, allowing for anyone to access it.
One of the researchers told TechCrunch that the data within could have allowed bad actors to locate other areas where Microsoft holds valuable data, which could have led to compromises of its services.
Microsoft was notified by SOCRadar of the issue on February 6 and Microsoft applied a fix on March 5. TechCrunch reports that it is not known how long the server was exposed for, or it anyone else had discovered the leak.
Leaking databases are a persistence problem, with many organizations failing to secure them properly. For example, in February, Zenlayer, a network services provider, failed to password-protect a database containing sensitive customer and company information.
Microsoft itself has also been guilty of the similar lapses in the past. In July last year, Chinese hackers stole a signing key to target email accounts belonging to government and business organizations, with the company conceding that it did not know how they had managed to acquire them.
