Microsoft Warns of 'Payroll Pirates' Hijacking HR SaaS Accounts to Steal Employee Salaries

A threat actor known as Storm-2657 has been observed hijacking employee accounts with the end goal of diverting salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts.

"Storm-2657 is actively targeting a range of U.S.-based organizations, particularly employees in sectors like higher education, to gain access to third-party human resources (HR) software as a service (SaaS) platforms like Workday," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report.

However, the tech giant cautioned that any software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform storing HR or payment and bank account information could be a target of such financially motivated campaigns. Some aspects of the campaign, codenamed Payroll Pirates , were previously highlighted by Silent Push, Malwarebytes, and Hunt.io.

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