Tag Archives: Azure

Initially planned to end on January 1, 2024, the availability of Azure compute reservation exchanges for Azure Virtual Machine, Azure Dedicated Host and Azure App Service has been extended until further notice.

You may continue exchanging your compute reservations for different instance series and regions until we notify you again, which will be at least 6 months in advance. In addition, any compute reservations purchased during this extended grace period will retain the right to one more exchange after the grace period ends. The extended grace period allows you to better assess your cost savings commitment needs and plan effectively. For more information about the exchange policy change, see Changes to the Azure reservation exchange policy.

Launched in October…

A dedicated host can encounter issues caused by user configurations or underlying host infrastructure. Host ‘Redeploy’ will simplify the process to move an Azure Dedicated Host and its associated Virtual Machines (VMs) from the current node to a different node of the same hardware generation. This could be considered as user-initiated service healing.

After redeploy all the properties of the host will remain unchanged except for ‘Asset Id’ and also any data on the VMs temporary disks would get deleted.

As part of the public preview we are enabling this capability in all regions of the Azure public cloud and users would be able to redeploy their hosts using Portal or CLI.
Support through powershell and support in soveriegn clouds is coming soon.

…

Hackers are going after highly-positioned professionals, including senior executives, with targeted phishing and cloud account takeover attacks, new research has claimed.

A report from Proofpoint outlined a new campaign to compromise Microsoft Azure environments and cloud accounts since late November 2023.

A campaign to hack into Azure Cloud accounts is targeting senior executives at a wide range of organizations, affecting hundreds of user accounts so far, according to California-based cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.

“In late November 2023, Proofpoint researchers detected a new malicious campaign, integrating credential phishing and cloud account takeover (ATO) techniques,” Proofpoint said in an advisory post. The firm notes that the attack is still ongoing.

The advisory post explains the technical details of the hacks, but in short, threat actors use shared documents that are individualized to the target as phishing lures. The document links, however, redirect users to a malicious phishing web page, where account details are stolen.

Once stolen, attackers register their multi-factor…