4 posts
Microsoft has introduced customer-accessible logging for the legacy Azure AD Graph API (graph.windows.net), closing a significant visibility gap historically abused by adversary enumeration tools like ROADrecon and AADInternals. Defenders can now ingest AzureADGraphActivityLogs into their SIEM to detect bulk directory reconnaissance, suspicious user agents, and internal API misuse.
ROADtools is an open-source Python framework designed for Entra ID exploration that has been co-opted by nation-state threat actors like APT29 and APT33. Attackers leverage its modules to conduct extensive directory reconnaissance, register rogue devices for persistence, and manipulate OAuth tokens to bypass interactive authentication controls such as MFA. Detection relies on identifying anomalous Microsoft Graph API queries, unusual user-agent strings, and default device registration artifacts.
A nuance in the Entra ID Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) protocol allows attackers with compromised credentials to authenticate against a permissive external tenant, generating a 'Sign-in: Success' log in the victim's home tenant. While this cross-tenant authentication does not grant access to the victim's data, it effectively poisons UEBA models and floods the SOC with false positive alerts, creating significant operational disruption and compromising log integrity.
Threat actors exploited an exposed Spring Boot Actuator endpoint and plaintext credentials found in a spreadsheet to authenticate via the legacy ROPC flow. This allowed them to bypass MFA, obtain a Microsoft Graph access token, and exfiltrate sensitive data from SharePoint Online without deploying malware.
