Since December 2019, Mandiant has observed advanced threat actors increase their investment in tools to facilitate bulk email collection from victim environments, especially as it relates to their support of suspected espionage objectives. Email messages and their attachments offer a rich source of information about an organization, stored in a centralized location for threat actors to collect. Most email systems, whether on-premises or in the cloud, offer programmatic methods to search and access email data across an entire organization, such as eDiscovery and the Graph API. Mandiant has observed threat actors use these same tools to support their own collection requirements and to target the mailboxes of individuals in victim organizations.
In this blog post, we introduce UNC3524, a newly discovered suspected espionage threat actor that, to date, heavily targets the emails of employees that focus on corporate development, mergers and acquisitions, and large corporate transactions.
Read more…
Source: Mandiant