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...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...