GINC-APT-0330 · Criminal

Payroll Pirates

Also Storm-2657.

Category
Criminal · Financially motivated: ransomware, fraud and theft.
Origin
United States(medium confidence)
Sources
6 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0330 · payroll-pirates

What it is

Storm-2657 is a financially motivated threat actor targeting US-based organizations, particularly in higher education, to compromise employee accounts and redirect salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts. They employ tactics such as creating inbox rules to delete warning notifications from HR platforms like Workday and using phishing emails that impersonate legitimate university communications to gain access. The actor modifies employee salary payment configurations to facilitate financial theft. Mitigation efforts include implementing phishing-resistant MFA methods to secure user identities against such attacks.

Names

The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.

Microsoft
Storm-2657

Attribution

Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.

Western sources

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • UNITEDRAKE

Sources

  • Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de