Midnight Blizzard conducts large-scale spear-phishing campaign using RDP files


Since October 22, 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Russian threat actor Midnight Blizzard sending a series of highly targeted spear-phishing emails to individuals in government, academia, defense, non-governmental organizations, and other sectors.

This activity is ongoing, and Microsoft will continue to investigate and provide updates as available. Based on our investigation of previous Midnight Blizzard spear-phishing campaigns, we assess that the goal of this operation is likely intelligence collection. Microsoft is releasing this blog to notify the public and disrupt this threat actor activity. This blog provides context on these external spear-phishing attempts, which are common attack techniques and do not represent any new compromise of Microsoft.

Read more…
Source: Microsoft


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Match, Hinge, OkCupid, and Panera Bread breached by ransomware group

    January 30, 2026

    The ShinyHunters ransomware group has claimed the theft of data containing 10 million records belonging to the Match Group and 14 million records from bakery-café chain Panera Bread. The Match Group, that runs multiple popular online dating services like Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, and Hinge has confirmed a cyber incident and is investigating the data breach. ...

  • Marquis confirms data breach, point finger of blame at SonicWall firewall

    January 30, 2026

    Marquis, a US fintech company building software for banks and credit unions, has confirmed suffering a ransomware attack and losing sensitive customer data, but shifted the blame onto its firewall provider, SonicWall. In mid-September 2025, SonicWall warned its firewall customers to reset their passwords after unnamed threat actors brute-forced their way into the company’s MySonicWall ...

  • Ivanti patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in EPMM

    January 30, 2026

    Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors. In January 2025, tens of thousands were urged to patch a Fortinet zero-day, while Ivanti customers were doing the same. There has been little change ...

  • Supply chain attack on eScan antivirus: detecting and remediating malicious updates

    January 29, 2026

    On January 20, a supply chain attack has occurred, with the infected software being the eScan antivirus developed by an Indian company MicroWorld Technologies. The previously unknown malware was distributed through the eScan update server. The same day, our security solutions detected and prevented cyberattacks involving this malware. On January 21, having been informed by Morphisec, ...

  • Microsoft Office zero-day lets malicious documents slip past security checks

    January 29, 2026

    Microsoft issued an emergency patch for a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in Office that allows attackers to bypass document security checks and is being exploited in the wild via malicious files. Microsoft pushed the emergency patch for the zero‑day, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, and classified it as a “Microsoft Office Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability” with a CVSS score ...

  • CISA: Fortinet Releases Guidance to Address Ongoing Exploitation of Authentication Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2026-24858

    January 28, 2026

    Newly disclosed vulnerability Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-2026-24858 allows malicious actors with a FortiCloud account and a registered device to log in to separate devices registered to other users in FortiOS, FortiManager, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiAnalyzer, if FortiCloud single sign on (SSO) is ...