It’s not recognized if that is a part of a coordinated marketing campaign focusing on US tech giants, or if it was separate factions inside Midnight Blizzard or Cozy Bear engaged on distinctive missions.
“Starting in late November 2023, the risk actor used a password spray assault to compromise a legacy non-production take a look at tenant account and achieve a foothold, after which used the account’s permissions to entry a really small proportion of Microsoft company electronic mail accounts, together with members of our senior management group and staff in our cybersecurity, authorized, and different features, and exfiltrated some emails and connected paperwork,” Microsoft stated in a weblog put up disclosing the assault.
Password spraying is a brute-force cyberattack the place attackers use a typical password throughout many accounts to bypass lockout insurance policies.
“The current Microsoft breach and disclosure brings to the forefront two challenges: nobody is immune (even international organizations) from risk actors, and as a company, it can take time to place any fixes in place,” stated Ravi Srinivasan, CEO, of cyber safety agency Votiro. “Anytime a risk is detected, it’s expensive and time-consuming to remediate.”
Two-factor authentication (2FA) mitigates password-spraying assaults by including an additional layer of safety past simply the password.
“This was a reasonably easy sort of an assault… one thing that might have been prevented by two-factor authentication, Microsoft was not imposing its personal insurance policies on sure methods,” Alex Stamos, an govt at SentinelOne and former Fb CSO, instructed CNBC.
