Hacking MSSQL on Cloud. All of them. How I became sysadmin on Azure, AWS, GCP and Alibaba.

It started as a simple security research project on a local SQL Server instance. A single vulnerability led me down a rabbit hole — from compromising Azure SQL Database to successfully escalating privileges on GCP CloudSQL for SQL Server, Amazon RDS, and Alibaba ApsaraDB.

In this session, I’ll walk you through the techniques I used to escalate from a limited user to sysadmin on managed SQL Server platforms offered by the four biggest cloud providers. I’ll also demonstrate post-exploitation techniques, including how I retrieved plaintext [sa] passwords from internal logs and accessed highly sensitive internal metadata.

More importantly, I’ll share lessons on how these vulnerabilities were possible in the first place — and what you, as a developer, DBA, or security professional, can do to secure your applications against similar attack vectors.

Finally, I’ll share how each cloud provider responded to the vulnerabilities I disclosed, the remediation timelines, and the broader lessons this experience teaches us about cloud security.