Microsoft Warns of ‘Payroll Pirates’ Hijacking HR SaaS Accounts to Steal Employee Salaries
Oct 10, 2025
SaaS Security / Threat Intelligence
A threat actor known as Storm-2657 has been observed hijacking employee accounts with the end goal of diverting salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts. "Storm-2657 is actively targeting a range of U.S.-based organizations, particularly employees in sectors like higher education, to gain access to third-party human resources (HR) software as a service (SaaS) platforms like Workday," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report. However, the tech giant cautioned that any software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform storing HR or payment and bank account information could be a target of such financially motivated campaigns. Some aspects of the campaign, codenamed Payroll Pirates , were previously highlighted by Silent Push, Malwarebytes, and Hunt.io. What makes the attacks notable is that they don't exploit any security flaw in the services themselves. Rather, they leverage social engineering tactics and a lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) protect...