Account holders for Microsoft email services are being targeted in a phishing campaign, according to security researchers from Zscaler’s ThreatLabz group.

　　The objective behind the threat actors’ efforts is believed to be the breaching of corporate accounts in order to perform business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

　　Stock Depot / Getty ImagesAs reported by Bleeping Computer, BEC-based activity would see payments being redirected toward hackers’ bank accounts via the use of forged documents.

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　　Zscaler, a cloud security company, said that targets were involved in various industries, such as fin-tech, lending, accounting, insurance, and Federal Credit Union organizations based in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Australia.

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　　At the moment, it seems the campaign has yet to be properly addressed by Microsoft, with new phishing domains being published nearly every day.

　　The campaign was originally detected in June 2022, with analysts observing a sudden rise in phishing attempts against the aforementioned industries, in addition to account holders of Microsoft email services.

　　Threat actors would incorporate links to the emails as buttons or HTML files that would redirect the target to a phishing page. Bleeping Computer points out how certain platforms don’t see open redirects as a vulnerability, which has led to these malicious redirects going through Google Ads, Snapchat, and DoubleClick.

　　Businesses and individuals are increasingly turning to multifactor authentication to secure their accounts. As such, obtaining a login email and password nowadays won’t provide anything of value to hackers.

　　Custom phishing kits and reverse proxies like Evilginx2, Muraena, and Modilshka have now come into play to bypass an MFA-enabled account.

　　A phishing proxy that essentially acts as a middle man between the victim and email provider service is capable of extracting the authentication cookies. Through this method, hackers can use the stolen cookies to log in and completely evade MFA for an account.

　　For this particular campaign, a custom proxy-based phishing kit was found utilizing the Beautiful Soup HTML and XML parsing tool, which amends actual login pages derived from corporate logins in order to incorporate phishing components.

　　Cyberattacks in general have nearly doubled since last year, while Microsoft itself started an initiative to tackle the rapid rise of cybercrime with its Security Experts program.