At CYBERWARCON 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence analysts will share research and insights on North Korean and Chinese threat actors representing years of threat actor tracking, infrastructure monitoring and disruption, and their attack tooling.
Since August 2023, Microsoft has observed intrusion activity targeting and successfully stealing credentials from multiple Microsoft customers that is enabled by highly evasive password spray attacks. Microsoft has linked the source of these password spray attacks to a network of compromised devices we track as CovertNetwork-1658, also known as xlogin and Quad7 (7777).
Microsoft has observed the threat actor tracked as Storm-0501 launching a multi-staged attack where they compromised hybrid cloud environments and performed lateral movement from on-premises to cloud environment, leading to data exfiltration, credential theft, tampering, persistent backdoor access, and ransomware deployment.
Microsoft Security researchers have observed a vulnerability used by various ransomware operators to get full administrative access to domain-joined ESXi hypervisors and encrypt the virtual machines running on them. The vulnerability involves creating a group called “ESX Admins” in Active Directory and adding an attacker-controlled user account to this group.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence presents cases of threat actors misusing OAuth applications as automation tools in financially motivated attacks.
The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0324 is a financially motivated group known to gain initial access using email-based initial infection vectors and then hand off access to compromised networks to other threat actors.
Analysis of the techniques used by the threat actor tracked as Storm-0558 (now tracked as Antique Typhoon) for obtaining unauthorized access to email data, tools, and unique infrastructure characteristics.
Microsoft has identified a phishing campaign conducted by the threat actor tracked as Storm-0978 targeting defense and government entities in Europe and North America. The campaign involved the abuse of CVE-2023-36884, which included a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability exploited via Microsoft Word documents.
Microsoft Defender Experts observed a multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) and business email compromise (BEC) attack targeting banking and financial services organizations over two days. This attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor, involved AiTM and BEC attacks across multiple supplier/partner organizations for financial fraud, and did not use a reverse proxy like typical AiTM attacks.
Microsoft detected a unique operation where threat actors carried out destructive actions in both on-premises and cloud environments.
