Microsoft: JADEPUFFER (Storm-3168) Used Agents to Enumerate, Then Wipe, an Azure Tenant in Seven Minutes

An Azure tenant whose two service principals were compromised, likely through credentials an employee had exposed in plaintext in a public GitHub issue

Microsoft published its analysis of Storm-3168, its name for JADEPUFFER, the group Sysdig documented in July as the first end-to-end agentic ransomware operation, on September 25, 2026. In early June 2026 one service principal made more than 300 read operations over 15.5 hours enumerating VMs, subscriptions, and resource groups; 90 minutes later the second enumerated VMs and resource groups across two subscriptions in five seconds. A seven-minute destructive sequence followed, with more than 100 storage account deletion attempts, most successful, and attempted deletions of SQL databases, Key Vaults, Function Apps, and App Services, then more than 30 successful `ListKeys` requests within 30 minutes. Five tokens were issued for the destruction principal, and two deletion streams ran in parallel during one 70-second window, consistent with machine orchestration. Azure resource locks blocked some deletions. Microsoft did not observe a ransom note or confirm data exfiltration

Long-lived workload identities with broad delete rights, exposed credentials left unrotated, and an attacker whose agent turned enumeration results into parallel destruction faster than any human responder could act