Security News
Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it's expanding cloud logging capabilities to help organizations investigate cybersecurity incidents and gain more visibility after facing criticism in the wake of a recent espionage attack campaign aimed at its email infrastructure. "Over the coming months, we will include access to wider cloud security logs for our worldwide customers at no additional cost," Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, and management at Microsoft, said.
Microsoft and the Ukraine CERT warn of new attacks by the Russian state-sponsored Turla hacking group, targeting the defense industry and Microsoft Exchange servers with a new 'DeliveryCheck' malware backdoor. The cyberspies have been associated with a wide array of attacks against Western interests over the years, including the Snake cyber-espionage malware botnet that was recently disrupted in an international law enforcement operation titled Operation MEDUSA. In a coordinated report and Twitter thread published today by CERT-UA and Microsoft, researchers outline a new attack where the Turla threat actors target the defense sector in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
Microsoft is expanding access to additional cloud logging data for customers worldwide at no additional cost, allowing easier detection of breached networks and accounts.This wider availability comes after Chinese hackers stole a Microsoft signing key that allowed them to breach corporate and government Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365 accounts to steal email.
Another way, which is apparently what Microsoft originally investigated, is that the attackers were able to steal enough data from the authentication servers to generate fraudulent but valid-looking authentication tokens for themselves. Microsoft ultimately determined that although the rogue access tokens in the Storm-0558 attack were legitimately signed, which seemed to suggest that someone had indeed pinched a company singing key.
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Microsoft Word documents exploiting known remote code execution flaws are being used as phishing lures to drop malware called LokiBot on compromised systems. The Word file that weaponizes CVE-2021-40444 contains an external GoFile link embedded within an XML file that leads to the download of an HTML file, which exploits Follina to download a next-stage payload, an injector module written in Visual Basic that decrypts and launches LokiBot.
Microsoft patches four exploited zero-days, but lags with fixes for a fifthFor July 2023 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has delivered 130 patches; among them are four for vulnerabilites actively exploited by attackers, but no patch for CVE-2023-36884, an Office and Windows HTML RCE vulnerability exploited in targeted attacks aimed at defense and government entities in Europe and North America. Apple pushes out emergency fix for actively exploited zero-dayApple has patched an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability by releasing Rapid Security Response updates for iPhones, iPads and Macs running the latest versions of its operating systems.
Microsoft on Friday said a validation error in its source code allowed for Azure Active Directory tokens to be forged by a malicious actor known as Storm-0558 using a Microsoft account consumer signing key to breach two dozen organizations. "Storm-0558 acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com," the tech giant said in a deeper analysis of the campaign.
Microsoft says it still doesn't know how Chinese hackers stole an inactive Microsoft account consumer signing key used to breach the Exchange Online and Azure AD accounts of two dozen organizations, including government agencies. The threat actors used the stolen Azure AD enterprise signing key to forge new auth tokens by exploiting a GetAccessTokenForResource API flaw, providing them access to the targets' enterprise mail.
While trends in phishing frequently evolve, Facebook and Microsoft's collective dominance as the most spoofed brands continues, according to Vade. Facebook and Microsoft's collective dominance as the most spoofed brands continued into H1 2023, with the former accounting for 18% of all phishing URLs and the latter accounting for 15%. Microsoft experienced increase in spoofing attempts.