This blog details our in-depth analysis of the attacks that used the CVE-2021-40444, provides detection details and investigation guidance for Microsoft 365 Defender customers, and lists mitigation steps for hardening networks against this and similar attacks.
During our year-long investigation of a targeted, invoice-themed XLS.HTML phishing campaign, attackers changed obfuscation and encryption mechanisms every 37 days on average, demonstrating high motivation and skill to constantly evade detection and keep the credential theft operation running.
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) alongside the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) has uncovered a private-sector offensive actor, or PSOA, that we are calling SOURGUM in possession of now-patched, Windows 0-day exploits (CVE-2021-31979 and CVE-2021-33771).
Microsoft threat analysts are tracking a continued increase in consent phishing emails, also called illicit consent grants, that abuse OAuth request links in an attempt to trick recipients into granting attacker-owned apps permissions to access sensitive data.
In this blog, we highlight four tools representing a unique infection chain utilized by NOBELIUM: EnvyScout, BoomBox, NativeZone, and VaporRage. These tools have been observed being used in the wild as early as February 2021 attempting to gain a foothold on a variety of sensitive diplomatic and government entities.
Phorpiex, an enduring botnet known for extortion campaigns and for using old-fashioned worms, began diversifying its infrastructure in recent years to become more resilient and to deliver more dangerous payloads. Today, the Phorphiex botnet continues to maintain a large network of bots and generates wide-ranging malicious activities. These activities have expanded to include cryptocurrency mining.
Microsoft is happy to have contributed and worked closely with the Center for Threat-Informed Defense and other partners to develop the MITRE ATT&CK® for Containers matrix.
We are open sourcing the Python source code of a research toolkit we call CyberBattleSim, an experimental research project that investigates how autonomous agents operate in a simulated enterprise environment using high-level abstraction of computer networks and cybersecurity concepts.
Microsoft continues to monitor and investigate attacks exploiting the recent on-premises Exchange Server vulnerabilities. As organizations recover from this incident, we continue to publish guidance and share threat intelligence to help detect and evict threat actors from affected environments.
Microsoft has detected multiple 0-day exploits being used to attack on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server in limited and targeted attacks. In the attacks observed, threat actors used this vulnerability to access on-premises Exchange servers, which enabled access to email accounts, and install additional malware to facilitate long-term access to victim environments.
A year ago, we reported the steady increase in the use of web shells in attacks worldwide. The latest Microsoft 365 Defender data shows that this trend not only continued, it accelerated. Read our investigation into the escalating prevalence of web shells.
Our continued investigation into the Solorigate attack has uncovered new details about the handover from the Solorigate DLL backdoor (SUNBURST) to the Cobalt Strike loader (TEARDROP, Raindrop, and others).
