This edition of Cyber Signals delves into the cybersecurity challenges facing classrooms and campuses, highlighting the critical need for robust defenses and proactive measures. From personal devices to virtual classes and research stored in the cloud, the digital footprint of school districts, colleges, and universities has multiplied exponentially.
Microsoft has observed the threat actor tracked as Storm-0501 launching a multi-staged attack where they compromised hybrid cloud environments and performed lateral movement from on-premises to cloud environment, leading to data exfiltration, credential theft, tampering, persistent backdoor access, and ransomware deployment.
Microsoft Security researchers have observed a vulnerability used by various ransomware operators to get full administrative access to domain-joined ESXi hypervisors and encrypt the virtual machines running on them. The vulnerability involves creating a group called “ESX Admins” in Active Directory and adding an attacker-controlled user account to this group.
Microsoft has identified a new North Korean threat actor, now tracked as Moonstone Sleet (formerly Storm-1789), that combines many tried-and-true techniques used by other North Korean threat actors, as well as unique attack methodologies to target companies for its financial and cyberespionage objectives.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-1811 misusing the client management tool Quick Assist to target users in social engineering attacks that lead to malware like Qakbot followed by Black Basta ransomware deployment.
Microsoft has been tracking activity related to the financially motivated threat actor Octo Tempest, whose evolving campaigns represent a growing concern for many organizations across multiple industries.
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.
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.
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.
In a recent investigation by Microsoft Incident Response of a BlackByte 2.0 ransomware attack, we found that the threat actor progressed through the full attack chain, from initial access to impact, in less than five days, causing significant business disruption for the victim organization.
Providing advanced protection against increasingly sophisticated human-operated ransomware, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint’s network protection leverages threat intelligence and machine learning to block command-and-control (C2) communications.
Microsoft has discovered recent activity indicating that the Raspberry Robin worm is part of a complex and interconnected malware ecosystem, with links to other malware families and alternate infection methods beyond its original USB drive spread.
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