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.
Microsoft says the early June disruptions to its Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email apps — were denial-of-service attacks by a shadowy new hacktivist group. In a blog post published Friday evening after The Associated Press sought clarification on the sporadic but serious outages, Microsoft confirmed that that they were DDoS attacks by a group calling itself Anonymous Sudan, which some security researchers believe is Russia-affiliated. The software giant offered few details on the attack. It did not comment on how many customers were affected.
Microsoft analyzes a threat group tracked as DEV-0196, the actor’s iOS malware “KingsPawn”, and their link to an Israel-based private sector offensive actor (PSOA) known as QuaDream, which reportedly sells a suite of exploits, malware, and infrastructure called REIGN, that’s designed to exfiltrate data from mobile devices.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), cybersecurity software company Fortra™ and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) are taking technical and legal action to disrupt cracked, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike and abused Microsoft software, which have been used by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware. This is a change in the way DCU has...
As we continue to enhance the security of our cloud, we are going to address the problem of email sent to Exchange Online from unsupported and unpatched Exchange servers. There are many risks associated with running unsupported or unpatched software, but by far the biggest risk is security. Once a version of Exchange Server is no longer supported, it no longer receives security updates; thus, any vulnerabilities discovered after support has ended don’t get fixed. There are similar risks associated with running software that is not patched for known vulnerabilities. Once a security update is released, malicious actors will reverse-engineer the update to get a better understanding of how to exploit the vulnerability on unpatched servers.