Storm-0539
- First seen
- 2021-01-01 00:00:00
- Primary motivation
- financial-gain
- Sophistication
- intermediate
- Resource level
- team
- Actor type
- criminal
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 12:13:15
Targeted industries: retail-and-hospitality
Context
Storm-0539 is a financially motivated threat actor that has been active since at least 2021. They primarily target retail organizations for gift card fraud and theft. Their tactics include phishing via emails or SMS to distribute malicious links that redirect users to phishing pages designed to steal credentials and session tokens. Once access is gained, Storm-0539 registers a device for secondary authentication prompts, bypassing multi-factor authentication and gaining persistence in the environment. They also collect emails, contact lists, and network configurations for further attacks against the same organizations.
Reports & references
- rewterz.com — Rewterz Threat Update Microsoft Warns Of Emerging Threat By Storm 0539 Behind Gift Card Frauds (report)
- Microsoft — 3970796 (report)
- raw.githubusercontent.com — Microsoftmapping (report)