A Critical Flaw in Azure Automation Exposed Accounts to Cross-Tenant Identity Takeovers
Microsoft has addressed a critical vulnerability in its Azure Automation service that had the potential to allow attackers to seize another tenant’s identity and access sensitive data, credentials, and cloud workloads. The issue arose due to a default setting that made Azure Automation accounts publicly accessible by default, creating a chain of code flaws that could have enabled cross-tenant identity takeovers.
Shay Shavit, a senior security researcher on Microsoft’s Azure Networking Security Research team, discovered the vulnerability last year and reported it to the company’s Security Response Center (MSRC). The issue, assigned a CVSS score of 9.9, was given the identifier CVE-2025-29827. While there have been no known exploits of the vulnerability, Shavit plans to demonstrate its potential impact at next month’s Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas.
Azure Automation is widely used by Microsoft and enterprises running Azure for DevOps, resource deployment, patching, and secrets rotation using scripted runbooks tied to embedded managed identities. The default configuration of making Azure Automation accounts publicly accessible created a vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker with access to their own account to breach the trust boundary and assume another tenant’s automation identity.
This would enable them to create or modify automation scripts and access sensitive configuration data or credentials stored in Azure Automation accounts. Furthermore, a successful attacker could also create, change, or delete resources across an organization’s cloud workloads. Shavit emphasizes that the default setting has since been changed, but organizations should still take precautions to minimize their risk.
The vulnerability is an example of how subtle misconfigurations and logic flaws can be chained to enable high-impact attacks. The exploit chain consisted of three distinct flaws: the default configuration making Azure Automation accounts publicly accessible, plus two separate code-level bugs. Shavit stresses that this finding highlights the importance of auditing the scope of identities and tokens assigned to cloud automation accounts.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first vulnerability discovered in the Azure Automation service. In 2021, researchers at Orca Security identified a flaw that could exfiltrate managed identity tokens from a shared sandbox server. While both vulnerabilities share the same goal – extracting a victim’s managed identity – the attack chains differ.
To mitigate similar risks, organizations should avoid exposing anything external unless there is a specific need to do so. Regularly auditing and monitoring cloud automation accounts can also help identify potential misconfigurations or logic flaws that could be exploited by attackers.
Source: Dark Reading — 2026-07-24