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Microsoft Security

Threat Intelligence

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence community is made up of more than 10,000 world-class experts, security researchers, analysts, and threat hunters analyzing 78 trillion signals daily to discover threats and deliver timely and hyper-relevant insight to protect customers. Our research covers a broad spectrum of threats, including threat actors and the infrastructure that enables them, as well as the tools and techniques they use in their attacks.

graphical user interface, application
Published
8 min read

When coin miners evolve, Part 1: Exposing LemonDuck and LemonCat, modern mining malware infrastructure 

LemonDuck, an actively updated and robust malware that’s primarily known for its botnet and cryptocurrency mining objectives, adopted more sophisticated behavior and escalated its operations. Today, beyond using resources for its traditional bot and mining activities, LemonDuck steals credentials, removes security controls, spreads via emails, moves laterally, and ultimately drops more tools for human-operated activity.

Published
7 min read

Behind the scenes of business email compromise: Using cross-domain threat data to disrupt a large BEC campaign 

Microsoft 365 Defender researchers recently uncovered and disrupted a large-scale business email compromise (BEC) infrastructure hosted in multiple web services. Attackers used this cloud-based infrastructure to compromise mailboxes via phishing and add forwarding rules, enabling these attackers to get access to emails about financial transactions.

Published
19 min read

Phorpiex morphs: How a longstanding botnet persists and thrives in the current threat environment 

Phorpiex, an enduring botnet known for extortion campaigns and for using old-fashioned worms, began diversifying its infrastructure in recent years to become more resilient and to deliver more dangerous payloads. Today, the Phorphiex botnet continues to maintain a large network of bots and generates wide-ranging malicious activities. These activities have expanded to include cryptocurrency mining.