Finegrained Microsoft cloud detection

One client rightfully complained that his timeline got all clogged up with not so useful banner changes. I was fixing this by moving the details to the details section (duh) of the notifications. This way they only become visible after you explicitly click something. While working on this I noticed that the most chatty servers in terms of banner changes where Microsoft Exchange online servers. This should not be, cloud services like this are supposed to be recognized and handled differently.

What was happening? I immediately updated the Microsoft IP ranges, which up until now was done manually. But this only fixed part of the problem. There were still servers that were clearly part of the Microsoft cloud that were not recognized. Microsoft publishes the ip ranges for the services (Office 365, Exchange, Sharepoint, Skype, etc,) they offer in these big 5 clouds:

• Worldwide Public and Government Community Cloud (GCC)
• U.S. Government GCC High
• U.S. Government DoD
• Germany
• China (Vianet)

I thought that "Worldwide Public and GCC" had to be located in one place, and since most of the ips in this range where in the U.S., it probably all was in the U.S. Consequently, all these ips were labeled "US public" in ShadowTrackr.

I did also know from some Dutch government clients that their servers are located in the Netherlands in the datacentre MS calls "Europe West" (yes, it's a shame they don't call it "Netherlands Central"). After a bit of searching it turned out that there are many more of these local datacentra. Microsoft even publishes a nice map that shows them all: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/

And there is a weekly updated XML file available on a different part of the Microsoft site. This XML file has ip ranges that only partly overlap with the big 5, which explains why ShadowTrackr did not recognize some servers as being in the Microsoft cloud. Problem solved!

So, if you have servers at Microsoft you might see them change the cloud description on your timeline. The old cloud clusters will still be available for about a week on your attack surface map in parallel to the new (actual) ones.

Oh, and cloud ip ranges are now automatically updated daily :-)