Microsoft Groups Utilized by Russia-Linked Hackers to Goal Companies With Phishing Marketing campaign, Microsoft Says

A Russian government-linked hacking group took goal at dozens of worldwide organizations with a marketing campaign to steal login credentials by participating customers in Microsoft Groups chats pretending to be from technical assist, Microsoft researchers stated on Wednesday.

These “extremely focused” social engineering assaults have affected “fewer than 40 distinctive international organizations” since late Might, Microsoft researchers stated in a weblog, including that the corporate was investigating.

The Russian embassy in Washington did not instantly reply to a request for remark.

The hackers arrange domains and accounts that appeared like technical assist and tried to interact Groups customers in chats and get them to approve multifactor authentication (MFA) prompts, the researchers stated.

“Microsoft has mitigated the actor from utilizing the domains and continues to research this exercise and work to remediate the influence of the assault,” they added.

Groups is Microsoft’s proprietary enterprise communication platform, with greater than 280 million lively customers, based on the corporate’s January monetary assertion.

MFAs are a extensively really useful safety measure aimed toward stopping hacking or stealing of credentials. The Groups focusing on suggests hackers are discovering new methods to get previous it.

The hacking group behind this exercise, identified within the trade as Midnight Blizzard or APT29, is predicated in Russia, and the UK and US governments have linked it to the nation’s international intelligence service, the researchers stated.

“The organizations focused on this exercise doubtless point out particular espionage aims by Midnight Blizzard directed on the authorities, non-government organizations (NGOs), IT providers, expertise, discrete manufacturing, and media sectors,” they stated, with out naming any of the targets.

“This newest assault, mixed with previous exercise, additional demonstrates Midnight Blizzard’s ongoing execution of their aims utilizing each new and customary strategies,” the researchers wrote.

Midnight Blizzard has been identified to focus on such organizations, primarily within the US and Europe, going again to 2018, they added.

The hackers used already-compromised Microsoft 365 accounts owned by small companies to make new domains that seemed to be technical assist entities and had the phrase “Microsoft” in them, based on particulars within the Microsoft weblog. Accounts tied to those domains then despatched phishing messages to bait folks by way of Groups, the researchers stated. 

© Thomson Reuters 2023  

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