Microsoft says Russia-linked hackers behind dozens of Teams phishing attacks

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Microsoft Teams chats pretending to be from technical support, Microsoft researchers said on Wednesday. These «highly targeted» social engineering attacks have affected «fewer than 40 unique global organizations» since late May, Microsoft researchers said in a blog, adding that the company was investigating. The Russian embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The hackers set up domains and accounts that looked like technical support and tried to engage Teams users in chats and get them to approve multifactor authentication (MFA) prompts, the researchers said. «Microsoft has mitigated the actor from using the domains and continues to investigate this activity and work to remediate the impact of the attack,» they added. Teams is Microsoft's proprietary business communication platform, with more than 280 million active users, according to the company's January financial statement.

MFAs are a widely recommended security measure aimed at preventing hacking or stealing of credentials. The Teams targeting suggests hackers are finding new ways to get past it. The hacking group behind this activity, known in the industry as Midnight Blizzard or APT29, is based in Russia and the UK and U.S.

governments have linked it to the country's foreign intelligence service, the researchers said. «The organizations targeted in this activity likely indicate specific espionage objectives by Midnight Blizzard directed at government, non-government organizations (NGOs), IT services, technology, discrete manufacturing, and media sectors,» they said, without naming any of the targets. «This latest attack, combined with past activity, further demonstrates Midnight Blizzard's ongoing execution of their objectives