In-depth analysis of July 2023 exploit chain featuring CVE-2023-36884 and CVE-2023-36584

During their analysis of a July 2023 campaign targeting groups supporting Ukraine’s admission into NATO, Unit 42 researchers discovered a new vulnerability for bypassing Microsoft’s Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) security feature. This activity has been attributed by the community to the pro-Russian Read More …

Microsoft to help Australia’s cyber spies amid $5bn investment in cloud computing

Microsoft says it will invest an additional $5bn in Australia over the next two years to expand hyperscale cloud computing capacity while collaborating with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to boost domestic protection from cyber threats. Anthony Albanese confirmed the Read More …

Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed terabytes of internal sensitive data

Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub. In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered Read More …

Unusually low 5 critical vulnerabilities included in Microsoft September Patch Tuesday, along with two zero-days

Microsoft disclosed 65 vulnerabilities across its suite of products and software Tuesday, only five of which are considered critical, which is very low compared to Microsoft’s usual security updates. However, there are two issues disclosed and patched this month that Read More …

Storm-0558: Understanding How Microsoft Failed to Protect Itself

You’re undoubtedly familiar with the so-called Storm-0558 attacks from July 2023. If not a quick recap: these attacks (widely attributed as the work of the Chinese government) compromised a number of high-value Exchange Online mailboxes, including the US Secretary of Read More …

Midnight Blizzard conducts targeted social engineering over Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified highly targeted social engineering attacks using credential theft phishing lures sent as Microsoft Teams chats by the threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Midnight Blizzard (previously tracked as NOBELIUM). This latest attack, combined with past Read More …

FortiGuard Labs Discovers Multiple Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Message Queuing Service

Over the last few months, FortiGuard Labs has discovered and reported multiple vulnerabilities found in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service. Microsoft patched these vulnerabilities in the April and July 2023 security updates. These patches are rated as critical/important, and Read More …

Comprehensive analysis of initial attack samples exploiting CVE-2023-23397 vulnerability

On March 14, 2023, Microsoft published a blogpost describing an Outlook Client Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVSS: 9.8 CRITICAL). The publication generated a lot of activity among white, grey and black hat researchers, as well as lots of publications and Read More …

Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access

As described in more detail in our July 11 blogs, Storm-0558 is a China-based threat actor with espionage objectives. Beginning May 15, 2023, Storm-0558 used forged authentication tokens to access user email from approximately 25 organizations, including government agencies and Read More …