An preliminary entry dealer related to a number of totally different ransomware operations is now conducting Microsoft Teams phishing assaults
By
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Alex Scroxton,
Security Editor
Published: 13 Sep 2023 12:08
A menace actor tracked in Microsoft’s taxonomy as Storm-0324 has been noticed switching up its techniques to include social engineering phishing assaults carried out by way of Microsoft Teams, Redmond has revealed.
Storm-0324, a so-called preliminary entry dealer (IAB), is linked to a number of prolific and harmful ransomware operations, together with some recognized to have deployed the Clop, Gandcrab, Maze and REvil lockers.
“Beginning in July 2023, Storm-0324 was observed distributing payloads using an open source tool to send phishing lures through Microsoft Teams chats,” wrote the Microsoft Threat Intelligence staff.
“This exercise just isn’t associated to the Midnight Blizzard social engineering campaigns over Teams that we noticed starting in May 2023. Because Storm-0324 palms off entry to different menace actors, figuring out and remediating Storm-0324 exercise can stop extra harmful follow-on assaults like ransomware.
From 2018 up till fairly lately, the group’s exercise has centred on distributing its malware, JSSLoader, on behalf of the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) actor Sangria Tempest – aka Elbrus, Carbon Spider, and FIN7 – utilizing what Microsoft described as “highly evasive infection chains with payment and invoice lures” linking to a SharePoint website from whence the unwary obtain a malicious ZIP archive containing the payload.
But the menace actor now seems to be exploiting a difficulty in Teams that was first recognized by Jumpsec researchers in June 2023, however left unpatched by Microsoft on the time, supposedly on the idea that it was not severe sufficient to repair instantly.
This exercise started in July – after the Jumpsec disclosure had acquired some consideration – and sure includes the usage of a publicly obtainable software referred to as TeamsPhisher, a Python program that lets Teams tenant customers connect recordsdata to messages despatched to exterior tenants.
It is not any stretch to see how this characteristic could be abused and this appears to be what Storm-0324 is doing, utilizing it to ship phishing lures resulting in the malicious SharePoint website. Its lures are recognized by the Teams platform as exterior ones, ought to exterior entry be enabled, that means they get by to potential victims fairly simply.
Defenders have quite a lot of choices to harden their networks towards these assaults, as set out by Microsoft.
“Microsoft takes these phishing campaigns very seriously and has rolled out several improvements to better defend against these threats,” the Threat Intel staff wrote.
“In accordance with Microsoft insurance policies, we’ve suspended recognized accounts and tenants related to inauthentic or fraudulent behaviour. We have additionally rolled out enhancements to the Accept/Block expertise in one-on-one chats inside Teams, to stress the externality of a person and their electronic mail handle so Teams customers can higher train warning by not interacting with unknown or malicious senders.
“We rolled out new restrictions on the creation of domains within tenants and improved notifications to tenant admins when new domains are created within their tenant. In addition to these specific enhancements, our development teams will continue to introduce additional preventative and detective measures to further protect customers from phishing attacks.”
Why is that this extra harmful than electronic mail phishing?
“This is a sophisticated phishing scam that will catch out many victims because they will not realise criminals can hijack on Microsoft Teams to carry out attacks,” mentioned My1Login CEO Mike Newman.
Newman defined that whereas individuals have a tendency to know the strategies cyber criminals use to ship phishing emails, Teams is extra readily seen as an inner communications platform.
“Employees place more trust in the tool and are more likely to open and action documents they receive in chats,” he mentioned.
“For organisations which can be fearful about this menace, it’s important to teach workers on all of the totally different strategies criminals can use to launch phishing assaults – from emails, cellphone calls, SMS to messaging platforms.
“Furthermore, with many of these scams being developed to steal employee credentials, organisations can improve their defences by removing passwords from employee hands. This means even when highly sophisticated scams do reach user inboxes, they can’t be tricked into handing over their credentials because they simply do not know them,” he added.
Cofense senior cyber menace intelligence analyst Max Gannon added: “Chat programs resembling Slack and Teams should be acknowledged by organisations as one thing that poses the identical menace stage as credential phishing emails. Any system that may be manipulated to make the most of a person’s belief can be utilized as a technique of entry…. Treating anyone supply as being a non-issue or as having a negligible menace stage can simply come again to hang-out decision-makers.
“That said, training users in any one platform enables them to apply the same skills and skepticism to any other platform. These incidents really drive home the necessity of organisations using all the tools at their disposal to account for threats they haven’t even yet recognised.”
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…. to be continued
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