Malicious IIS extensions quietly open persistent backdoors into servers
Attackers are increasingly leveraging managed IIS extensions as covert backdoors into servers, providing a durable persistence mechanism for attacks.
North Korean threat actor targets small and midsize businesses with H0lyGh0st ransomware
A group of actors originating from North Korea that MSTIC tracks as DEV-0530 has been developing and using ransomware in attacks since June 2021. This group, which calls itself H0lyGh0st, utilizes a ransomware payload with the same name.
From cookie theft to BEC: Attackers use AiTM phishing sites as entry point to further financial fraud
A large-scale phishing campaign that attempted to target over 10,000 organizations since September 2021 used adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing sites to steal passwords, hijack a user’s sign-in session, and skip the authentication process, even if the user had enabled multifactor authentication (MFA).
Toll fraud malware: How an Android application can drain your wallet
Toll fraud malware, a subcategory of billing fraud in which malicious applications subscribe users to premium services without their knowledge or consent, is one of the most prevalent types of Android malware – and it continues to evolve.
Using process creation properties to catch evasion techniques
We developed a robust detection method in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint that can catch known and unknown variations of a process execution class used by attackers to evade detection. This class of stealthy execution techniques include process doppelganging, process herpadering, and process ghosting.
Improving AI-based defenses to disrupt human-operated ransomware
To disrupt human-operated ransomware attacks as early as possible, we enhanced the AI-based protections in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with a range of specialized machine learning techniques that swiftly identify and block malicious files, processes, or behavior observed during active attacks.
Detecting and preventing privilege escalation attacks leveraging Kerberos relaying (KrbRelayUp)
The privilege escalation hacking tool KrbRelayUp is a wrapper that can streamline the use of some features in Rubeus, KrbRelay, SCMUACBypass, PowerMad/ SharpMad, Whisker, and ADCSPwn tools in attacks. Although this attack won’t function for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) joined devices, hybrid joined devices with on-premises domain controllers remain vulnerable.
Anatomy of a DDoS amplification attack
Amplification attacks are one of the most common distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack vectors. These attacks are typically categorized as flooding or volumetric attacks, where the attacker succeeds in generating more traffic than the target can process, resulting in exhausting its resources due to the amount of traffic it receives.
Rise in XorDdos: A deeper look at the stealthy DDoS malware targeting Linux devices
Observing a 254% increase in activity over the last six months from a versatile Linux trojan called XorDdos, the Microsoft 365 Defender research team provides in-depth analysis into this stealthy malware’s capabilities and key infection signs.
In hot pursuit of ‘cryware’: Defending hot wallets from attacks
The rise in cryptocurrency market capitalization paved the way to the emergence of threats Microsoft security researchers are referring to as “cryware”—information stealers focused on gathering and exfiltrating data from non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets.