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More than a thousands of web applications incorrectly revealed 38 million records on the open internet, data from numerous Covid-19 contact browsing platforms, vaccine registration, job application portals and employee databases. The data included a wealth of sensitive information, including people’s phone numbers and home addresses, social security numbers, and the status of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The incident has affected major companies and organizations, including American Airlines, Ford, transportation and logistics companies JB Hunt, the Maryland Department of Health, the New York City Department of Transportation and the New York Public Schools. Although data exposures have since been corrected, they show how a bad configuration can affect a popular platform.
The displayed data was stored in the Microsoft Power Apps portal service, a development platform that facilitates the creation of web or mobile applications for external use. In a pandemic, let’s say, if you need to quickly expand your vaccine appointment registration area, Power Apps portals can create a backend for both the public and data management.
Beginning in May, investigators from the security company Upguard began researching Numerous Power Apps portals reveal data that should be publicly private, including some Power Apps designed for Microsoft purposes. None of the data has been dangerous, but the discovery is still significant, as it has been overseen in the design of Power Apps portals.
The Power Apps platform not only manages internal databases and provides the basics, but also provides interfaces for programming applications that are ready to interact with that data. But Upguard researchers noted that when enabling these APIs, the platform preferred to make the relevant data publicly available. Enabling privacy settings was a manual process. As a result, many customers misconfigured their applications leaving the security default.
“We found one of these that was misconfigured to reveal the data and we thought, we’ve never heard of it, is this the only thing or is it a systemic problem?” says Greg Pollock, vice president of cyber research at UpGuard. “Because of the operation of the Power Apps portal product, it’s very easy to do a quick survey. And we found that tons of them are exposed. It was wild.”
The types of information found by the researchers were extensive. JB Hunt’s exposure was data from job seekers that included social security numbers. And Microsoft itself unveiled a number of databases on its Power Apps portals, including an old platform called “Global Payroll Service,” two portals for “Business Tools Support,” and the “Customer Insights” portal.
Information was limited in many ways. The fact that the state of Indiana, for example, has been exposed to the Power Apps portal does not mean that all the data that the state has has been revealed. Only a subset of the contact tracing data used on the state Power Apps portal was involved.
There was a misconfiguration of cloud-based databases serious problem over the years, revealed huge amounts of data improper access or theft. They all have major cloud companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure take steps storing customer data privately by default from the beginning and marking potential misconfigurations, but the industry did not prioritize the problem until recently.
After years of misconfiguration and data exposure, Upguard researchers were shocked to discover these problems on an unseen platform. Upguard tried to analyze exposures and report to as many affected organizations as possible. The researchers were unable to reach all of the entities because they were too many, so they also reported the findings to Microsoft. In early August, Microsoft he announced Power Apps portals will prioritize the storage of API data and other information in a private manner. Companies too has released a tool customers can use it to check portal settings. Microsoft has not responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
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