Since early October 2023, Microsoft has observed North Korean nation-state threat actors Diamond Sleet and Onyx Sleet exploiting the Jet Brains TeamCity CVE-2023-42793 remote-code execution vulnerability. Given supply chain attacks carried out by these threat actors in the past, Microsoft assesses that this activity poses a particularly high risk to organizations who are affected.
User containment is a unique and innovative defense mechanism that stops human-operated attacks in their tracks. We’ve added user containment to the automatic attack disruption capability in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.
Since February 2023, Microsoft has observed a high volume of password spray attacks attributed to Peach Sandstorm, an Iranian nation-state group. In a small number of cases, Peach Sandstorm successfully authenticated to an account and used a combination of publicly available and custom tools for persistence, lateral movement, and exfiltration.
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.
China-based actor Flax Typhoon is exploiting known vulnerabilities for public-facing servers, legitimate VPN software, and open-source malware to gain access to Taiwanese organizations, but not taking further action.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified highly targeted social engineering attacks using credential theft phishing lures sent as Microsoft Teams chats by the threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Midnight Blizzard (previously tracked as NOBELIUM).
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 attributes several campaigns to a distinct Russian state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Cadet Blizzard (DEV-0586), including the WhisperGate destructive attack, Ukrainian website defacements, and the hack-and-leak front “Free Civilian”.
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.
