Teen researcher exposes major flaw in Microsoft’s Titan analytics system
A forged token let the researcher reach internal employee and Bing analytics data before Microsoft fixed the flaw via its bug bounty program.
A teenage security researcher known as Faav used his custom AI assistant to uncover a critical authentication flaw in Microsoft’s internal Titan analytics platform, exposing a SQL endpoint that lacked proper signature verification on JSON Web Tokens. By crafting a token that claimed administrator privileges, he gained access to an Azure-hosted analytics database containing roughly 25,000 Microsoft employee records plus organization dashboards and other internal data. Further inspection showed access to Bing analytics data sources, where aggregating table sizes revealed roughly 17 trillion rows of telemetry and related data. Faav relied on Antares, his AI-based automation tool, to map subdomains and probe the API for over a week, then combined its output with his own insight to realize the signature check was missing. Microsoft treated this as a bug bounty submission and awarded him $5,000 for responsibly disclosing the vulnerability.
Why it matters
This incident shows how a single missed security check in an internal analytics tool can open a path into sensitive corporate data, including employee records and large-scale product telemetry. It underlines that internal platforms handling production analytics need the same level of scrutiny and hardened authentication as public-facing services, and that external bug hunters continue to play a key role in catching issues before they are abused.
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