Community Alert: Ongoing Malicious Campaign Impacting Azure Cloud Environments
Over the past weeks, Proofpoint researchers have been monitoring an ongoing cloud account takeover campaign impacting dozens of Microsoft Azure environments and compromising hundreds of user accounts, including senior executives. This post serves as a community warning regarding the attack and offers suggestions that affected organizations can implement to protect themselves from it.
In late November 2023, Proofpoint researchers detected a new malicious campaign, integrating credential phishing and cloud account takeover (ATO) techniques. As part of this campaign, which is still active, threat actors target users with individualized phishing lures within shared documents. For example, some weaponized documents include embedded links to “View document” which, in turn, redirect users to a malicious phishing webpage upon clicking the URL.
Threat actors seemingly direct their focus toward a wide range of individuals holding diverse titles across different organizations, impacting hundreds of users globally. The affected user base encompasses a wide spectrum of positions, with frequent targets including Sales Directors, Account Managers, and Finance Managers. Individuals holding executive positions such as “Vice President, Operations”, "Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer" and "President & CEO" were also among those targeted. The varied selection of targeted roles indicates a practical strategy by threat actors, aiming to compromise accounts with various levels of access to valuable resources and responsibilities across organizational functions.
