Microsoft Titan flaw exposed 17.3 trillion rows to a teen

A 16-year-old security researcher who goes by Faav found that Microsoft's Titan analytics service accepted forged login tokens. The flaw gave him administrator access to 17 databases holding an estimated 17.3 trillion rows of data, CyberPress reports. Microsoft locked the service down on September 9, 2026, and paid him a $5,000 bug bounty. The cause was one of the oldest mistakes in web security: the service never checked the token's signature.

What went wrong in Titan

Titan is a Microsoft analytics platform. Like many web services, it uses JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to know who is logged in. A JWT is a small pass that holds a username and a digital signature. The server is supposed to check that signature, because it proves the server itself issued the pass.

Titan skipped that check, iTnews reports. CyberPress says Faav set the token's algorithm field to "none," which declares that a token has no signature at all. He then changed the username claim to "admin." Titan accepted it.

Logging in as "admin" gave him user ID 1 and full administrator rights, iTnews reports. From there he could send SQL queries, the commands that read data from a database, as an administrator.

How much was exposed

The numbers are large because Titan sat in front of a lot of data. CyberPress lists what the researcher mapped:

What he could reach	Count
ClickHouse database setups	24
Connected analytics databases	17
Unique table names	9,863
Estimated rows	17,333,335,124,315
Application accounts	about 25,000
Microsoft employee email records	17,990
Employee organization records	15,001

ClickHouse is an open-source database built for fast analytics on very large tables. VnExpress rounds the employee records to about 18,000.

Faav kept his footprint small. He pulled only two single-row samples during about 10 days of testing, iTnews reports.

The AI tool behind the find

Faav built an AI tool called Antares to do the repetitive parts of security research. CyberPress says Antares first flagged the flaw on August 25. The researcher then followed it up by hand.

"Antares wouldn't have gotten here alone, and neither would I," Faav said, as quoted by iTnews and VnExpress. He credits its persistence plus "one human hunch."

How Microsoft responded

The fix came fast once Microsoft knew. VnExpress gives the timeline below, and CyberPress matches its last two dates.

Date (2026)	Event
August 25	Antares flags the flaw
September 5	Faav reports it to Microsoft
September 9	Microsoft asks him to stop testing and locks down the API
September 17	Microsoft awards the $5,000 bounty

Microsoft thanked him in a statement. His report "helped us to better protect our customers by hardening our services," the company said, as quoted by VnExpress. The iTnews report adds that Microsoft gave editorial input on Faav's public write-up, including cut sections, redacted images and changes to how the impact was described.

What this means for developers

Check that every service you run verifies JWT signatures, and rejects tokens marked "none." Most JWT libraries do this by default, but a wrong setting or a hand-written parser can turn it off. Write a test that sends a token with the "none" algorithm and expects a rejection.

Pin the algorithm your server accepts. Do not let the token itself tell the server how to check it. GitHub's App installation tokens became JWTs on October 2, so more developers will be handling these tokens directly.

Treat analytics and admin tools as exposed. An outside researcher reached Titan's API with nothing but a forged token. Give back-office dashboards the same authentication tests as public apps, and do not let a single "admin" name unlock everything.

Expect more finds like this one. A teenager with a home-built AI tool found this flaw. Attackers can build the same kind of tool, so basic mistakes like a skipped signature check get found faster.