More than 38 million records from 47 different entities that rely on Microsoft’s Power Apps portals platform were inadvertently left exposed online, bringing into sharp focus a “New vector of data exposure.”

Power Apps is a Microsoft-powered development platform for building low-code custom business apps that work across mobile and the web using prebuilt templates, in addition to offering APIs to enable access to data by other applications, including options to retrieve and store information.

The company describes the service as a “Suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.”

A misconfiguration in the way a portal could share and store data could lead to a scenario wherein sensitive data is made publicly accessible, resulting in a potential data leak.

“Power Apps portals have options built in for sharing data, but they also have built in data types that are inherently sensitive,” the researchers said.

“In cases like registration pages for COVID-19 vaccinations, there are data types that should be public, like the locations of vaccination sites and available appointment times, and sensitive data that should be private, like the personally identifying information of the people being vaccinated.”