Gift Card Fraud | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft is calling attention to a Morocco-based cybercrime group dubbed  Storm-0539  that's behind gift card fraud and theft through highly sophisticated email and SMS phishing attacks. "Their primary motivation is to steal gift cards and profit by selling them online at a discounted rate," the company  said  in its latest Cyber Signals report. "We've seen some examples where the threat actor has stolen up to $100,000 a day at certain companies." Storm-0539 was  first spotlighted  by Microsoft in mid-December 2023, linking it to social engineering campaigns ahead of the year-end holiday season to steal victims' credentials and session tokens via adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing pages. The gang, also called Atlas Lion and active since at least late 2021, is known to then abuse the initial access to register their own devices to bypass authentication and obtain persistent access, gain elevated privileges, and compromise gift card-related ser...

Microsoft is warning of an uptick in malicious activity from an emerging threat cluster it's tracking as  Storm-0539  for orchestrating gift card fraud and theft via highly sophisticated email and SMS phishing attacks against retail entities during the holiday shopping season. The goal of the attacks is to propagate booby-trapped links that direct victims to adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing pages that are capable of harvesting their credentials and session tokens. "After gaining access to an initial session and token, Storm-0539 registers their own device for subsequent secondary authentication prompts, bypassing MFA protections and persisting in the environment using the fully compromised identity," the tech giant  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). The foothold obtained in this manner further acts as a conduit for escalating privileges, moving laterally across the network, and accessing cloud resources in order to grab sensitive informa...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...