Microsoft, along with a group of industry partners, disrupted EvilTokens, a short-lived but highly consequential cybercrime platform that investigators linked to more than 12,000 compromised Microsoft customer email inboxes across more than 10,000 organizations globally, the company said Tuesday.

Acting on federal court order Sept. 15, Microsoft and partners seized 50 websites the phishing-as-a-service used for operations and disabled more than 175 domains linked to EvilTokens’ supporting infrastructure. 

EvilTokens, launched in February 2026, was “a powerful cybercrime platform that used AI at every step of the attack chain — from compromising email accounts to designing intricate roadmaps for financial fraud and scams,” Steven Masada, associate general counsel and general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post.

About 1,000 cybercriminals used EvilTokens over the course of its operation, a Microsoft spokesperson told CyberScoop.

The service was centered on an AI-style chatbot that cybercriminals used to analyze victims’ inboxes, identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations and other sensitive details that could facilitate fraud.

“AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages. It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible,” Masada wrote. 

EvilTokens was one of the most widely used phishing-as-a-service platforms prior to its takedown. It facilitated business-email compromise campaigns by stealing session tokens that allowed cybercriminals to sift through a victim’s inbox and maintain persistent access.

“We cannot estimate the total fraud attributable to all EvilTokens activity. However, we were able to correlate at least 13 complaints filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center to EvilTokens-linked activity, representing approximately $1.7 million in reported losses,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Because many incidents go unreported and not all victims can be definitively linked to specific campaigns, we believe this is a conservative estimate.”

Victims of EvilTokens were largely concentrated in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India and France, according to Microsoft. SpyCloud, which supported the takedown, identified compromised email domains spanning 79 countries.

Microsoft said it also identified two men behind EvilTokens — Felix Utomi and Waidi Segun Adams — and attributes the development and support of the platform to Storm-2992, a threat actor unaffiliated with any other known cybercrime groups.

The United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police acted on that information Sept. 18 when it served warrants in the greater London area, arrested the men accused of making articles for use in fraud and money laundering and seized their digital devices.

The Metropolitan Police said it received information from Microsoft about EvilTokens’ administrators in August. Utomi and Adams were released on bail as the investigation continues. 

“The two primary operators identified in our investigation were residing in the U.K.,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told CyberScoop. “While our investigation focused on those individuals, we believe others may have supported the operation in various capacities.”

Microsoft’s legal filing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia refers to five additional unidentified people allegedly acting as support personnel and users.

Microsoft and others involved in the EvilTokens takedown, including Health-ISAC, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Shadowserver and TRM Labs, didn’t fully quantify how much fraud the service enabled, but it gained popularity quickly among cybercriminals and was lucrative for its operators.

Coinbase, which also aided the investigation into EvilTokens, said it traced about $1.1 million in revenue for EvilTokens from its paying customers. The virtual currency company’s threat researchers found more than 1,000 deposits to EvilTokens from more than 700 distinct addresses through June 2026. 

Operators sold access to the service through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription. EvilTokens significantly lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals by including specialized tools for identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering and financial fraud in a single interface.

The service allowed cybercriminals to map organizational structure and permissions in Microsoft Graph, which enabled lateral movement, researchers said. With active tokens gained through a collection of highly-targeted phishing lures, cybercriminals consistently bypassed multi-factor authentication, email gateways and endpoint security tools.

Microsoft said the platform’s creators developed portions of the platform with AI and it uncovered capabilities from multiple AI models. 

“It packaged much of the criminal process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation,” Masada added.

The companies and organizations involved in the globally-coordinated takedown identified and notified potential victims, shared indicators of compromise and shared intelligence with law enforcement about EvilToken’s operators and some of its customers.

Experts advised organizations and employees to treat unsolicited device codes as a red flag, assume compromised accounts are fully cataloged in minutes, and independently verify requests to change payment information or redirect funds.

“The infrastructure supporting EvilTokens has been disrupted, but the model it demonstrated will not disappear with it,” Masada warned.

The post Microsoft and partners disrupt EvilTokens, a comprehensive cybercrime service for financial fraud appeared first on CyberScoop.

Attackers are targeting prominent, high-profile people, their family members and acquaintances on a commercial messaging application to gain long-term access to their accounts containing sensitive data, the FBI warned in an alert Tuesday.

Officials did not describe the objectives or origins of the attackers, which have more recently impersonated government officials, journalists and publicly known personalities. Attackers are tricking victims into granting them access to a legitimate cloud service, such as Microsoft or Google, under the guise of reviewing a draft article or document.

The ongoing threat, which the FBI has been tracking since late 2025, showcases a “deceptive, sophisticated approach to access user accounts without requiring a password,” the FBI wrote in the public service announcement. The malicious links, which enable OAuth consent phishing, provide attackers with persistent access to a targeted victim’s account.

“Once permission is obtained, it can only be revoked by the victim invalidating the token in their application security settings — not by changing the password,” the FBI wrote.

Authorities did not provide any details about the victims targeted by the campaign or how many people have already been compromised by these attacks. Threat actors previously impersonated event coordinators and planners, using invitations and identity verification requests as lures to gain access to their accounts.

By social engineering unsuspecting victims via OAuth consent phishing, attackers gain full visibility into the target’s configured permissions, allowing them to access emails, files and other sensitive data.

“If the user approves the request, they unwittingly grant high-level access to a malicious application controlled by the cyber actor,” the FBI added. “By registering malicious applications through legitimate authorization protocols and using social engineering tactics, cyber actors can bypass both passwords and multi-factor authentication, which makes consent phishing especially dangerous.”

OAuth is a standardized and widely adopted protocol for authorizing access to applications and other services, including APIs. The standard uses tokens to establish and maintain authorized access to separate resources or services. 

The FBI encouraged people to scrutinize communications from unfamiliar phone numbers or accounts, independently verify the identity of the sender and only grant access to trusted applications.

The post FBI raises alarm over deceptive phishing campaign targeting prominent people appeared first on CyberScoop.

A Russian state-sponsored threat group has been stealing sensitive data from governments and commercial organizations since July 2025 via a novel exploit in popular Linux-based enterprise software, U.S. authorities and cyber officials from more than a dozen other countries warned in a joint cybersecurity advisory Thursday.

Laundry Bear’s most recent espionage campaign involves the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that wasn’t patched until November 2025, five months after attacks were well underway, officials said. 

The exploit just requires a view — no clicks — and allows attackers to steal the previous 90 days’ worth of email, the account’s password, search history, the victim organization’s email directory, two-factor authentication tokens and other newly created passwords.

“The covert and persistent nature of this activity, along with the absence of any known financial extortion, almost certainly indicates this group’s involvement in espionage activities with Russian government backing,” officials wrote in the advisory. 

“Additionally, extensive Ukrainian targeting, prior to use against U.S. and other NATO allies, outlines an increasing trend within Russian cyber threat groups to target Ukrainian users first—both as a priority target and as a testbench for malicious cyber techniques before broader global deployment.”

The state-sponsored espionage group, also known as Void Blizzard, has compromised governments and organizations in the defense, education, energy, law enforcement, media, finance, transportation and technology sectors. 

Laundry Bear’s year-long campaign involving the exploitation of CVE-2025-66376 showcases more technical capabilities, including a custom JavaScript payload it delivers to targeted victims via phishing emails. The threat group could also likely adapt the novel data exfiltration and aggregation capability, dubbed “beehive,” to exploit other vulnerabilities, officials warned.

The defect’s medium-severity rating of 6.1 underscores the challenge defenders regularly confront in prioritizing patching schedules based on measure of severity alone.

The Russian state-supported group, which has been active since at least 2024, is still actively exploiting Zimbra Collaboration Suite instances that remain unpatched, officials said.

Authorities shared Thursday indicators of compromise, mitigation steps and urged organizations to update their vulnerable software.

“This campaign’s targeted victimology and limited exploitation capabilities likely indicate this group manually identifies and targets the victim organizations” by identifying organizations with public-facing infrastructure, officials wrote in the advisory.

Once a target is identified, Laundry Bear also likely compiles email addresses for users to target with the exploit via phishing emails. Officials did not identify specific victims or describe the volume of organizations already compromised.

The joint cybersecurity advisory was issued by the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

The post Russian espionage group using novel Zimbra exploit to steal sensitive data from Western countries appeared first on CyberScoop.

China-aligned attackers broke into the networks of U.S. and Canadian universities to steal sensitive data and establish persistent access via webshells and backdoors, Proofpoint threat researchers said Tuesday. 

The espionage-motivated attacks targeted physics and engineering departments, focusing on administrators and professors with national security links or organizations researching astrophysics and particle physics.

Proofpoint identified less than 10 university victims and estimates a few dozen universities may be impacted, Greg Lesnewich, principal threat researcher at Proofpoint, told CyberScoop. The company first observed the campaign in May and believes the campaign is ongoing. 

“There is a high likelihood that many victims have not been made aware of this activity yet,” Lesnewich added.

Researchers traced the attacks to a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Roundcube, an open-source email client, that were exploited and chained together to steal credentials and gain long-term access.

The threat cluster, which Proofpoint tracks as UNK_MassTraction, exploited CVE-2024-42009 to execute JavaScript inside the victim’s browser, then exploited CVE-2025-49113 to gain a foothold in the mailserver. 

The initial exploit in the chain only requires a victim to open an email, and the attackers sent victims a series of generic lures to trigger the initial access.

Proofpoint attributes the campaign to a China-aligned cluster because the attackers used a known covert network used by multiple China-aligned threat groups, an infection chain leading to VShell and left Chinese language artifacts in the phishing emails. 

Researchers haven’t drawn any conclusions about why attackers targeted the universities and what they are seeking. 

“We do not have data to suggest what got stolen, as we only observe the initial inbound email attempt,” Lesnewich said. 

The engineering aspects do align with China’s strategic initiatives, he added. Google threat hunters recently spotted a Chinese state-sponsored espionage group that burrowed into systems for years, stealing data across academia, medicine, military, cybersecurity and foreign policy. 

“China-aligned adversaries have been targeting other types of edge devices such as routers and VPN concentrators for years with various exploits to create a foothold into a target network, not using email for delivery,” Lesnewich said. “This campaign flips that on its head, using email to deliver an exploit chain to compromise a mail server, instead of using email to deliver a credential harvesting URL or malware to target an end user, not a server.”

The post Suspected Chinese espionage group used a Roundcube exploit chain to burrow into universities appeared first on CyberScoop.

Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.

Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.

ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.

“These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.

Kelley told CyberScoop that “we’ve seen some offerings that touch on this capability, but this definitely seems more fleshed out and polished than previous instances.”

ARToken is also notable for its evasive capabilities, with a seven-layer anti-analysis system, the post states.

The research provides further details on what ARToken’s actual phishing lures look like in practice. They are targeted, rather than scattershot and opportunistic, as one lure the firm examined shows.

“The messages spoof an accounts-payable contact at a legitimate Wisconsin contractor, addressed to an accounts-payable recipient at a U.S. life sciences company — abusing a real vendor relationship rather than inventing a sender,” Kelley wrote. “The lure theme is an outstanding-invoice inquiry (‘the following invoices appear to still be outstanding… advise when this will be processed’), the kind of message accounts-payable staff are conditioned to act on.”

Kelley told CyberScoop that Cisco Talos doesn’t yet have a full sense of the breadth of the activity, nor who is making use of the capability.

“We’ve seen the public sector targeted but it’s unlikely to be the only one,” he said.

The post This phishing kit looks more like BEC-as-a-service appeared first on CyberScoop.