Microsoft alerts organizations to sophisticated phishing email threat

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center has uncovered a wide-scale malicious email campaign by a group it associates with the 2020 compromise of the SolarWinds Orion platform, the center announced in a blog post yesterday. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency encourages organizations to review the blog post and apply the necessary mitigations.

The Biden administration in April officially attributed the compromise of the SolarWinds Orion platform to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), also known as APT 29, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes.

“This is a highly sophisticated ongoing attack being perpetrated by these nation-state actors,” said John Riggi, AHA senior advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “The field should be particularly focused on this threat as the phishing email identified by Microsoft in their alert appears to originate from USAID’s Office of American Schools and Hospitals Abroad.”

For more information on this or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org.