Microsoft Outlook Flaw Exploited by Russia's APT28 to Hack Czech, German Entities

May 04, 2024
Newsroom

Czechia and Germany on Friday revealed that they were the target of a long-term cyber espionage campaign conducted by the Russia-linked nation-state actor known as APT28, drawing condemnation from the European Union (E.U.), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.K., and the U.S.

The Czech Republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), in a statement, said some unnamed entities in the country have been attacked using a security flaw in Microsoft Outlook that came to light early last year.

"Cyber attacks targeting political entities, state institutions and critical infrastructure are not only a threat to national security, but also disrupt the democratic processes on which our free society is based," the MFA said.

The security flaw in question is CVE-2023-23397, a now-patched critical privilege escalation bug in Outlook that could allow an adversary to access Net-NTLMv2 hashes and then use them to authenticate themselves by means of a relay attack.

https://thehackernews.com/2024/05/microsoft-outlook-flaw-exploited-by.html?_m=3n%2e009a%2e3348%2eqb0ao44uux%2e2cp2