Microsoft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft has disclosed that it's detected a spike in credential-stealing attacks conducted by the Russian state-affiliated hacker group known as Midnight Blizzard. The intrusions, which make use of residential proxy services to obfuscate the source IP address of the attacks, target governments, IT service providers, NGOs, defense, and critical manufacturing sectors, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said. Midnight Blizzard, formerly known as Nobelium , is also tracked under the monikers APT29, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes. The  group , which drew worldwide attention for the SolarWinds supply chain compromise in December 2020, has  continued  to rely on  unseen tooling  in its targeted attacks aimed at foreign ministries and diplomatic entities. It's a sign of how determined they are to keep their operations up and running despite being exposed, which makes them a particularly formidable actor in the espionage area. "These credential attacks us

Internet-facing Linux systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are being targeted as part of a new campaign designed to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. "The threat actors behind the attack use a backdoor that deploys a wide array of tools and components such as rootkits and an IRC bot to steal device resources for mining operations," Microsoft threat intelligence researcher Rotem Sde-Or  said . "The backdoor also installs a patched version of OpenSSH on affected devices, allowing threat actors to hijack SSH credentials, move laterally within the network, and conceal malicious SSH connections." To pull off the scheme, misconfigured Linux hosts are brute-forced to gain initial access, following which the threat actors move to disable shell history and fetch a trojanized version of OpenSSH from a remote server. The rogue OpenSSH package is configured to install and launch the backdoor, a shell script that allows the attackers to distribute additional payloads a

Microsoft on Friday attributed a string of service outages aimed at Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive earlier this month to an uncategorized cluster it tracks under the name  Storm-1359 . "These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools," the tech giant  said  in a post on Friday. Storm-#### (previously DEV-####) is a temporary designation the Windows maker assigns to unknown, emerging, or developing groups whose identity or affiliation hasn't been definitively established yet. While there is no evidence that any customer data was accessed or compromised, the company noted the attacks "temporarily impacted availability" of some services. Redmond said it further observed the threat actor launching  layer 7 DDoS attacks  from multiple cloud services and open proxy infrastructures. This includes HTTP(S) flood attacks, which bombard the target services with a

Microsoft on Wednesday took the lid off a "novel and distinct Russian threat actor," which it said is linked to the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate ( GRU ) and has a "relatively low success rate." The tech giant's Threat Intelligence team, which was previously tracking the group under its emerging moniker  DEV-0586 , has graduated it to a named actor dubbed  Cadet Blizzard . "Cadet Blizzard seeks to conduct disruption, destruction, and information collection, using whatever means are available and sometimes acting in a haphazard fashion," the company  said . "While the group carries high risk due to their destructive activity, they appear to operate with a lower degree of operational security than that of longstanding and advanced Russian groups such as  Seashell Blizzard  and  Forest Blizzard ." Cadet Blizzard first came to light in January 2022 in connection with destructive cyber activity targeting Ukraine using a novel w

Two "dangerous" security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry that could have been exploited to carry out cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. "The vulnerabilities allowed unauthorized access to the victim's session within the compromised Azure service iframe, which can lead to severe consequences, including unauthorized data access, unauthorized modifications, and disruption of the Azure services iframes," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS attacks  take place when threat actors inject arbitrary code into an otherwise trusted website, which then gets executed every time when unsuspecting users visit the site. The two flaws identified by Orca leverage a weakness in the postMessage iframe, which enables cross-origin communication between Window objects. This meant that the shortcoming could be abused to embed endpoints within remote servers usin

Microsoft has rolled out fixes for its Windows operating system and other software components to remediate major security shortcomings as part of  Patch Tuesday updates  for June 2023. Of the 73 flaws, six are rated Critical, 63 are rated Important, two are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. This also includes three issues the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser. It's worth noting that Microsoft also closed out  26 other flaws  in Edge – all of them rooted in Chromium itself – since the release of May Patch Tuesday updates. This comprises  CVE-2023-3079 , a zero-day bug that Google disclosed as being actively exploited in the wild last week. The June 2023 updates also mark the first time in several months that doesn't feature any zero-day flaw in Microsoft products that's publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. Topping the list of fixes is  CVE-2023-29357  (CVSS score: 9.8), a privilege escalation flaw in ShareP

"Dozens" of organizations across the world have been targeted as part of a broad business email compromise ( BEC ) campaign that involved the use of adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) techniques to carry out the attacks. "Following a successful phishing attempt, the threat actor gained initial access to one of the victim employee's account and executed an 'adversary-in-the-middle' attack to bypass Office 365 authentication and gain persistence access to that account," Sygnia researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once gaining persistence, the threat actor exfiltrated data from the compromised account and used his access to spread the phishing attacks against other victim's employees along with several external targeted organizations." The findings come less than a week after Microsoft  detailed  a similar combination of an AitM phishing and a BEC attack aimed at banking and financial services organizations. Sygnia t

Security researchers have warned about an "easily exploitable" flaw in the Microsoft Visual Studio installer that could be abused by a malicious actor to impersonate a legitimate publisher and distribute malicious extensions. "A threat actor could impersonate a popular publisher and issue a malicious extension to compromise a targeted system," Varonis researcher Dolev Taler  said . "Malicious extensions have been used to steal sensitive information, silently access and change code, or take full control of a system." The vulnerability, which is tracked as  CVE-2023-28299  (CVSS score: 5.5), was addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for April 2023, describing it as a spoofing flaw. The bug discovered by Varonis has to do with the Visual Studio user interface, which allows for spoofed publisher digital signatures. Specifically, it trivially bypasses a restriction that prevents users from entering information in the "product

Banking and financial services organizations are the targets of a new multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack, Microsoft has revealed. "The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations," the tech giant  disclosed  in a Thursday report. Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under its emerging moniker  Storm-1167 , called out the group's use of indirect proxy to pull off the attack. This enabled the attackers to flexibly tailor the phishing pages to their targets and carry out session cookie theft, underscoring the continued sophistication of AitM attacks. The modus operandi is unlike other AitM campaigns where the decoy pages act as a  reverse proxy  to harvest credentials and time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) entered by the victims. "The attacker presented targets with a website that mi

Details have emerged about a now-patched actively exploited security flaw in Microsoft Windows that could be abused by a threat actor to gain elevated privileges on affected systems. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2023-29336 , is rated 7.8 for severity and concerns an elevation of privilege bug in the Win32k component. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft  disclosed  in an advisory issued last month as part of Patch Tuesday updates. Avast researchers Jan Vojtěšek, Milánek, and Luigino Camastra were credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. Win32k.sys is a kernel-mode driver and an integral part of the Windows architecture, being responsible for graphical device interface (GUI) and window management. While the exact specifics surrounding in-the-wild abuse of the flaw is presently not known, Numen Cyber has deconstructed the patch released by Microsoft to craft a proof-of-concept ( PoC ) exploit

Microsoft has agreed to pay a penalty of $20 million to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that the company illegally collected and retained the data of children who signed up to use its Xbox video game console without their parents' knowledge or consent. "Our proposed order makes it easier for parents to protect their children's privacy on Xbox, and limits what information Microsoft can collect and retain about kids," FTC's Samuel Levine  said . "This action should also make it abundantly clear that kids' avatars, biometric data, and health information are not exempt from  COPPA ." As part of the proposed settlement, which is pending court approval, Redmond has been ordered to update its account creation process for children to prevent the collection and storage of data, including obtaining parental consent and deleting said information within two weeks if approval is not obtained. The privacy protections also extend to third-par

Microsoft has officially linked the  ongoing active exploitation  of a critical flaw in the Progress Software MOVEit Transfer application to a threat actor it tracks as  Lace Tempest . "Exploitation is often followed by deployment of a web shell with data exfiltration capabilities," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of tweets today. "CVE-2023-34362 allows attackers to authenticate as any user." Lace Tempest, also called Storm-0950, is a ransomware affiliate that overlaps with other groups such as FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. It's also known to operate the Cl0p extortion site.  The threat actor also has a track record of exploiting different zero-day flaws to siphon data and extort victims, with the group recently observed weaponizing a  severe bug in PaperCut servers . CVE-2023-34362 relates to an SQL injection vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer that enables unauthenticated, remote attackers to gain access to the application database

Microsoft has shared details of a now-patched flaw in Apple macOS that could be abused by threat actors with root access to bypass security enforcements and perform arbitrary actions on affected devices. Specifically, the flaw – dubbed  Migraine  and tracked as CVE-2023-32369 – could be abused to get around a key security measure called System Integrity Protection ( SIP ), or "rootless," which limits the actions the root user can perform on protected files and folders. "The most straight-forward implication of a SIP bypass is that [...] an attacker can create files that are protected by SIP and therefore undeletable by ordinary means," Microsoft researchers Jonathan Bar Or, Michael Pearse, and Anurag Bohra  said . Even worse, it could be exploited to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and even access sensitive data by replacing databases that manage Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) policies. The bypass is made possible by leveraging a built-in macOS tool called  Migrat

A new stealthy information stealer malware called Bandit Stealer has caught the attention of cybersecurity researchers for its ability to target numerous web browsers and cryptocurrency wallets.  "It has the potential to expand to other platforms as Bandit Stealer was developed using the Go programming language, possibly allowing cross-platform compatibility," Trend Micro  said  in a Friday report. The malware is currently focused on targeting Windows by using a legitimate command-line tool called  runas.exe  that allows users to run programs as another user with different permissions. The goal is to escalate privileges and execute itself with administrative access, thereby effectively bypassing security measures to harvest wide swathes of data. That said, Microsoft's access control mitigations to prevent unauthorized execution of the tool means an attempt to run the malware binary as an administrator requires providing the necessary credentials. "By using the

A stealthy China-based group managed to establish a persistent foothold into critical infrastructure organizations in the U.S. and Guam without being detected,  Microsoft  and  the "Five Eyes" nations  said on Wednesday. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is tracking the activity, which includes post-compromise credential access and network system discovery, under the name  Volt Typhoon . The state-sponsored actor is  geared  towards espionage and information gathering, with the cluster active since June 2021 and obscuring its intrusion footprint by taking advantage of tools already installed or built into infected machines. Some of the prominent sectors targeted include communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, information technology, and education. The company further assessed with moderate confidence that the campaign is "pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications i

A financially motivated cyber actor has been observed abusing Microsoft Azure  Serial Console  on virtual machines (VMs) to install third-party remote management tools within compromised environments. Google-owned Mandiant attributed the activity to a threat group it tracks under the name  UNC3944 , which is also known as Roasted 0ktapus and Scattered Spider. "This method of attack was unique in that it avoided many of the traditional detection methods employed within Azure and provided the attacker with full administrative access to the VM," the threat intelligence firm  said . The emerging adversary, which first came to light late last year, is known to  leverage SIM swapping attacks  to breach telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies since at least May 2022. Subsequently, Mandiant also  found  UNC3944 utilizing a loader named STONESTOP to install a malicious signed driver dubbed POORTRY that's designed to terminate processes associated

A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS or PaaS) platform named  Greatness  has been leveraged by cybercriminals to target business users of the Microsoft 365 cloud service since at least mid-2022, effectively lowering the bar to entry for phishing attacks. "Greatness, for now, is only focused on Microsoft 365 phishing pages, providing its affiliates with an attachment and link builder that creates highly convincing decoy and login pages," Cisco Talos researcher Tiago Pereira  said . "It contains features such as having the victim's email address pre-filled and displaying their appropriate company logo and background image, extracted from the target organization's real Microsoft 365 login page." Campaigns involving Greatness have mainly manufacturing, health care, and technology entities located in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, South Africa, and Canada, with a spike in activity detected in December 2022 and March 2023. Phishing kits like Greatness offer t