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Ned Peterson (@NedPeterson99) on X
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Ned Peterson (@NedPeterson99) on X

A post summarizing a joint FBI and six-country advisory on actors tied to Integrity Technology Group (the sanctioned Chinese firm linked to Flax Typhoon and the Raptor Train botnet). They password-sprayed Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts over EWS, OWA, ActiveSync and PowerShell with EBurst. They then drained mailboxes with a PHP bot over Exchange Web Services and an office-cli utility using stored client ID, tenant ID and secret values, and exposed the stolen email to third parties through a web app, in some cases restricted to Xiamen IP addresses. Victims were in government, law enforcement, healthcare and religious organizations across Southeast Asia, Africa and North America, with activity since at least January 2021. Defensive takeaways: enforce MFA on every legacy path, retire basic auth and EWS, audit OAuth apps and service principals with mail-read rights, and alert on bulk mailbox pulls.

TL;DR FBI-led advisory: Integrity Technology Group-linked actors sprayed M365/Exchange with EBurst, bulk-pulled mail via EWS and an app secret, and served it through a web portal.

Organisations named here

  • FBI

Technologies named here

  • EBurst
  • Microsoft 365
  • PHP bot
  • Microsoft Exchange
  • office-cli
  • Exchange Web Services
  • Outlook on the web
  • ActiveSync
  • PowerShell
  • PHP
  • OAuth

Techniques named here

  • Password spraying

Threat actors named here

  • Integrity Technology Group
  • Flax Typhoon
  • Raptor Train