Information
Blobs in Azure storage accounts may contain sensitive or personal data, such as ePHI or financial information. Data that is erroneously modified or deleted by an application or a user can lead to data loss or unavailability.
It is recommended that soft delete be enabled on Azure storage accounts with blob storage to allow for the preservation and recovery of data when blobs or blob snapshots are deleted.
Blobs can be deleted incorrectly. An attacker or malicious user may do this deliberately in order to cause disruption. Deleting an Azure storage blob results in immediate data loss. Enabling this configuration for Azure storage accounts ensures that even if blobs are deleted from the storage account, the blobs are recoverable for a specific period of time, which is defined in the "Retention policies," ranging from 7 to 365 days.
NOTE: Nessus has provided the target output to assist in reviewing the benchmark to ensure target compliance.
Solution
Remediate from Azure Portal
- Go to Storage Accounts
- For each Storage Account with blob storage, under Data management go to Data protection
- Check the box next to Enable soft delete for blobs
- Set the retention period to a sufficient length for your organization.
- Click Save
Remediate from Azure CLI
For each storage account requiring remediation, run the following command to enable soft delete for blobs:
az storage blob service-properties delete-policy update --days-retained <retention-days> --account-name <storage-account> --enable true
Impact:
All soft-deleted data is billed at the same rate as active data. Additional costs may be incurred for deleted blobs until the soft delete period ends and the data is permanently removed.