Targeted Phishing Attacks Successfully Hacked Top Executives At 150+ Companies

In the last few months, multiple groups of attackers successfully compromised corporate email accounts of at least 156 high-ranking officers at various firms based in Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Dubbed ‘PerSwaysion,’ the newly spotted cyberattack campaign leveraged Microsoft file-sharing services—including Sway, SharePoint, and OneNote—to launch highly targeted phishing attacks.

According to a report Group-IB Threat Intelligence team published today and shared with The Hacker News, PerSwaysion operations attacked executives of more than 150 companies around the world, primarily with businesses in finance, law, and real estate sectors.

“Among these high-ranking officer victims, more than 20 Office365 accounts of executives, presidents, and managing directors appeared.”

So far successful and still ongoing, most PerSwaysion operations were orchestrated by scammers from Nigeria and South Africa who used a Vue.js JavaScript framework based phishing kit, evidently, developed by and rented from Vietnamese speaking hackers.

“By late September 2019, PerSwaysion campaign has adopted much mature technology stacks, using Google appspot for phishing web…