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.
Since mid-April 2024, Microsoft has observed an increase in defense evasion tactics used in campaigns abusing file hosting services like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Dropbox. These campaigns use sophisticated techniques to perform social engineering, evade detection, and compromise identities, and include business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
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 identified a North Korean threat actor exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Chromium (CVE-2024-7971) to gain remote code execution (RCE) in the Chromium renderer process. Our assessment of ongoing analysis and observed infrastructure attributes this activity to Citrine Sleet, a North Korean threat actor that commonly targets the cryptocurrency sector for financial gain.
In this blog post, read how Microsoft Incident Response leverages three types of threat intelligence to enhance incident response scenarios.
Between April and July 2024, Microsoft observed Iranian state-sponsored threat actor Peach Sandstorm deploying a new custom multi-stage backdoor, which we named Tickler.
Microsoft researchers found multiple vulnerabilities in OpenVPN that could lead to an attack chain allowing remote code execution and local privilege escalation. This attack chain could enable attackers to gain full control over targeted endpoints, potentially resulting in data breaches, system compromise, and unauthorized access to sensitive information.
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.
On July 25, 2024, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted an individual linked to the North Korean threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Onyx Sleet. Microsoft Threat Intelligence collaborated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in tracking activity associated with Onyx Sleet.
Join Microsoft Security leaders and other security professionals from around the world at Black Hat USA 2024 to learn the latest information on security in the age of AI, cybersecurity protection, threat intelligence insights, and more.
