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FBI warns about fast-growing phishing kit targeting Microsoft 365 users

22 May 2026 at 16:41

The FBI is warning organizations and defenders about Kali365, a growing phishing-as-a-service platform that retrieves Microsoft 365 access tokens, issuing a public service announcement Thursday. 

The toolkit bypasses multi-factor authentication and abuses OAuth device code authorizations via phishing lures impersonating common enterprise services. This technique grants cybercriminal-controlled applications access to Microsoft 365 accounts, opening victims up to a host of follow-on malicious activity, including data theft, fraud, extortion and ransomware attacks.

Kali365 is one of many rapidly emerging device-code phishing tools, which are gaining popularity as a more effective means for cybercriminals to circumvent security controls while abusing legitimate Microsoft device authorization pages, according to researchers. 

Instead of gaining access to accounts via phishing kits that steal credentials and second-factor authentication codes, device-code phishing platforms connect a malicious app to a legitimate account with a single code. The process requires fewer steps and less interaction with the user, but victims do have to copy-and-paste a code generated by the Kali365 platform to grant access.

“We see quite a bit of this device-code phishing activity, but so much of it looks really similar. They’re all using the same types of lures, the same types of content, the same branding,” Selena Larson, senior threat researcher at Proofpoint, told CyberScoop. “It is very much AI generated, AI driven, and the threat actors, I think, are finding it pretty effective because we’re seeing this shift happen kind of all at once.”

Proofpoint researchers observed seven device-code phishing tools that looked nearly identical during a 10-day period last month.

Device-code phishing isn’t new, but platforms like Kali365 have integrated new techniques that differ from MFA phishing, and might be more effective as a result. “It’s something that people might not be used to. It’s a little bit sleeker,” Larson said.

This also partly explains why these cybercriminal tools are growing so quickly. Larson said Proofpoint observed an explosion in device-code phishing activity starting in February. 

By April, Kali365 was up and running and primarily distributed on Telegram, according to the FBI. “Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities,” the agency said in the public warning. 

Researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs, which has also been tracking large-scale campaigns linked to Kali365, said the platform charges affiliates $250 for 30 days of service or $2,000 for a full year.

Kali365 stores the OAuth access and refresh tokens it captures, and makes those available to affiliates on its platform. Those tokens can also be shared and reused by other cybercriminals who didn’t participate in the initial phishing lure, Arctic Wolf researchers added. 

The FBI also noted that these Microsoft 365 tokens provide persistent access, allowing attackers to wade through multiple Microsoft services without a password or additional MFA requests. 

“Identity can be very, very powerful once you’re in an organization,” Larson said, adding that attackers can abuse that access to impersonate people, access and steal data for extortion, commit fraud and deploy malware.

The post FBI warns about fast-growing phishing kit targeting Microsoft 365 users appeared first on CyberScoop.

Major tech manufacturer Foxconn confirms cyberattack hit North American factories

14 May 2026 at 10:23

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electronics sold by major tech vendors, is recovering from a cyberattack that disrupted some of the company’s factories in North America.

Nitrogen, a ransomware group that’s known for targeting organizations in the manufacturing, construction and technology sectors, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and said it stole 8 terabytes of data spanning more than 11 million files. 

The threat group posted screenshots of some of the allegedly stolen data and claimed it compromised “confidential instructions, projects and drawings from Intel, Apple, Google, Dell, Nvidia and many other projects.” 

Foxconn is famously known as the primary assembler of Apple iPhones. Apple and the other companies allegedly impacted by the attack did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Foxconn confirmed some of its factories in North America suffered a cyberattack, and said its cybersecurity team immediately responded to the breach by implementing additional “measures to ensure the continuity of production and delivery.”

The spokesperson did not answer questions about when the attack occurred or what systems or data was impacted, but noted that “affected factories are currently resuming normal production” as of Tuesday. 

Nitrogen was first observed in 2023, using ALPHV, one of the most prevalent ransomware variants at that time, Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop. The group started using stolen code from Conti, another formerly prolific ransomware variant, in 2024 to build its own custom attack tools to hit Windows and VMware server environments, she added.

The threat group has most recently focused on companies in the manufacturing and technology sectors. “However, the most recent cases of claims by Nitrogen do not include a working file listing on the leak site and include mostly older images of files,” Kaiser said. “This raises questions about whether Nitrogen is inflating data-theft claims in an attempt to pressure victims into paying higher ransoms.”

Foxconn hasn’t described the nature of the attack or confirmed the existence of a ransom demand. 

Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat research and intelligence at Arctic Wolf Labs, said Nitrogen follows a “consistent playbook, stealing data before encrypting systems so they have leverage on multiple fronts, combining operational disruption with the threat of sensitive information being exposed.”

The threat group’s tactics indicate it’s not opportunistic, but rather “operating with a defined model, focusing on organizations that are easier to access but still critical enough to drive pressure and payment,” Valenzuela added. 

Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry with headquarters in Taiwan, is among the world’s largest companies with $259 billion in revenue last year, the company said. Foxconn’s North American footprint includes multiple factories in Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Indiana.

The post Major tech manufacturer Foxconn confirms cyberattack hit North American factories appeared first on CyberScoop.

Critical defect in Java security engine poses serious downstream security risks

10 March 2026 at 13:36

A maximum-severity vulnerability in pac4j, an open-source library integrated into hundreds of software packages and repositories, poses a significant security threat, but has thus far received scant attention.

The defect in the Java security engine, which handles authentication across multiple frameworks, has not been exploited in the wild since code review firm CodeAnt AI published a proof-of-concept exploit last week. The company discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to pac4j’s maintainer, which disclosed the defect and released patches for affected versions of the library within two days.

Some researchers told CyberScoop they are concerned about the vulnerability — CVE-2026-29000 — because it affects a widely deployed Java security engine that attackers can exploit with relative ease.

“A threat actor only needs to access a server’s public RSA key to attempt exploitation,” researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs said in an email. 

These public keys, which are shared openly, are used to encrypt data and enable identity authentication. Attackers can trigger the defect and bypass authentication by forging a JSON Web Token (JWT) or deploy raw JSON claims via JSON Web Encryption (JWE) in pac4j-jwt to break into a system with the highest privileges.

“It is currently too early into the lifecycle of this vulnerability to tell if it will materialize into a major threat but the fact that it is a vulnerability in a library makes it more challenging to assess the potential risk,” researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs said. “Downstream consumers of the library may end up needing to issue their own advisories, as we’ve seen with other similar vulnerabilities in the past.”

Amartya Jha, co-founder and CEO at CodeAnt AI, warned that anyone with basic JWT knowledge can achieve exploitation. The vulnerability is a “logic flaw that no pattern-matching scanner or rule-based static application security testing tool would surface, because there’s no single line of code that’s wrong.”

The downstream security risk, as is often the case with open-source software, is widespread. The authentication module for pac4j is integrated into multiple frameworks, including Spring Security, Play Framework, Vert.x, Javalin and others, Jha said.

Many organizations may not realize they depend on pac4j-jwt because it’s not always declared in build files, he added. CodeAnt said it has contacted hundreds of maintainers in the past week to warn them that their packages and repositories are impacted by the vulnerability, which has a CVSS rating of 10.

Researchers haven’t observed any additional PoC exploit code, but they noted the exploit path is easy to reproduce. 

“The conditions for exploitation are favorable,” Jha said. “It’s pre-authentication, requires no secrets, the PoC is public, and the attack surface includes any internet-facing application or API gateway using the affected configuration. The window between public PoC and patch adoption is where the risk is highest.”

The post Critical defect in Java security engine poses serious downstream security risks appeared first on CyberScoop.

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