Security News
A new phishing campaign is abusing Microsoft Teams messages to send malicious attachments that install the DarkGate Loader malware. The campaign started in late August 2023, when Microsoft Teams phishing messages were seen being sent by two compromised external Office 365 accounts to other organizations.
It's a cat-and-mouse struggle as tech giants Microsoft and Apple deal with persistent threats from China state actors and Pegasus spyware. Revelations this week from Microsoft and Apple speak to the COVID-like persistence of cyber threats and the ability of threat actors to adapt in the wild, steal credentials and sidestep patches.
Recently, a slew of activity by the advanced persistent threat group Lazarus has focused on finding vulnerable Microsoft IIS servers and infecting them with malware or using them to distribute malicious code. This article describes the details of the malware attacks and offers actionable suggestions for protecting Microsoft IIS servers against them.
Microsoft, which earlier this week admitted not being able to detect a Chinese attack on its own infrastructure, has published a report [PDF] titled "Digital threats from East Asia increase in breadth and effectiveness." In the report, Redmond's Threat Intelligence group expounds on its fresh insight into evolving online aggressions from both China and North Korea. The report details the work of a group Microsoft has named "Raspberry Typhoon" that "Typically conducts intelligence collection and malware execution" and likes to target ministries that oversee defense, intelligence, economic matters, and trade.
Microsoft is rolling out a new version of the Paint application on Windows 11 Insider builds that can remove the background from any picture with the click of a button. You can see a demonstration of the background removal below using the Windows wallpaper.
Microsoft says North Korean hacking groups have breached multiple Russian government and defense targets since the start of the year. "Multiple North Korean threat actors have recently targeted the Russian government and defense industry - likely for intelligence collection - while simultaneously providing material support for Russia in its war on Ukraine," said Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft's Digital Threat Analysis Center.
The mystery of how Chinese hackers managed to steal a crucial signing key that allowed them to breach Microsoft 365's email service and access accounts of employees of 25 government agencies has been explained: they found it somewhere where it shouldn't have been - Microsoft's corporate environment. The signing key was included in the snapshot of the crashed process of a consumer signing system because of an unexpected race condition, and its presence in the crash dump wasn't detected by Microsoft's credential scanning methods.
Microsoft on Wednesday revealed that a China-based threat actor known as Storm-0558 acquired the inactive consumer signing key to forging tokens to access Outlook by compromising an engineer's corporate account. "A consumer signing system crash in April of 2021 resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process," the Microsoft Security Response Center said in a post-mortem report.
Mistakes were made, lessons learned, stuff now fixed, says Windows maker Remember that internal super-secret Microsoft security key that China stole and used to break into US government email...
Microsoft says Storm-0558 Chinese hackers stole a signing key used to breach government email accounts from a Windows crash dump after compromising a Microsoft engineer's corporate account. While investigating Storm-0558's attack, Microsoft found that the MSA key was leaked into a crash dump after a consumer signing system crashed in April 2021.