Any VMs have public ip numbers and registered domain names. Therefore these machines are accessible to the internet and vulternable to attack. Using available Azure VM images has its advantages but a verification of security measures is required to ensure that the VMs are not immediately open to intrusion and do not become compromised over time.
Ideally a vm should be created from distro sources and provisioned and uploaded to Azure accordingly. The following outlines the process to build a CentOS 7.x minimal installation and load it to Azure : Prepare a CentOS-based virtual machine for Azure, 05/09/2016. The current Swarm Nodes were built on top of publically available CentOS vm images. These should likely be replaced once the integration of all the moving parts is complete and the setup and provisioning of this configuratio