Microsoft: Phishing Campaign Uses Fake Compliance Notices
📩 Microsoft Defender Research disclosed a large-scale credential-theft campaign that targeted over 35,000 users at roughly 13,000 organizations using polished fake internal compliance notifications. Running April 15–16, 2026, the messages used enterprise-style HTML templates, organization-specific names and attached PDFs that redirected recipients through a Cloudflare CAPTCHA to staged authentication pages. Attackers employed an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) flow to harvest tokens and compromise accounts, primarily impacting US firms but seen in 26 countries. Microsoft recommends enabling passwordless authentication, using authenticator apps for MFA, turning on Safe Links and Safe Attachments, and configuring attack disruption in Microsoft Defender XDR.
