Investigating a report from someone in the office today I found their browser displaying one of those full screen "Your computer has been hacked, call this phone number" pages. Not too surprising: I clicked the exit full screen button. But when I looked at the URL it appeared to be a legit Microsoft host name (and had obviously evaded the browser blacklisting filter). After some digging in the DNS and traceroute to the host I still can't exclude the possibility that an MS service has been compromised. It had a valid cert issued by MS Azure CA.
Question is what should someone do with this information? I'm 99.9% sure if I fill out Microsoft's "report hacking" form nobody will read it. otoh a compromised MS service seems like a thing I should try to report to someone. Perhaps I'm confused somehow about the evidence and it's running on a throwaway VPS with a unicode character in the DNS zone. Doesn't seem so however.
On the theory that the attacker hasn't actually compromised the MS DNS, I suspect that they've figured out a way to get an auto-generated DNS A record that points to an Azure-hosted VM from which they deliver the payload. They're also somehow able to use a cert with CN: *.web.core.windows.net but should that be valid also for foo.z13.web.code.windows.net? Apparently yes. TIL
I did find this site, with a report of a very similar URL: https://urlquery.net/ . When I submitted mine it ran a check, displayed the same malware screen I had seen, but declared the site to be problem free.
For obvious reasons I don't want to post the URL but you can construct it from this hostname: errorzxx9120x6er in this zone: z13.web.core.windows.net
The zones all the way down to z13 seem to be owned by MS, as is the netblock where the server resides.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1b0m7nj/legit_win...
Looks like it's Azure stuff, not an actual compromise of Microsoft services.
It was Microsofts dumb idea to use the windows.net domain for azure stuff.
Is it possible that it's the "exploit" detailed here?
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/tech-support-scamme...
Not saying it is, but it would explain why it appears to be a compromised Microsoft page.