Storm-2657
Aliases: Payroll Pirates
- Primary motivation
- financial-gain
- Sophistication
- intermediate
- Resource level
- team
- Actor type
- criminal
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 12:23:05
Targeted industries: education-and-nonprofits financial-services
Targeted regions: country_code:us
Context
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.
Reports & references
- Microsoft — Investigating Targeted Payroll Pirate Attacks Affecting Us Universities (report)
- raw.githubusercontent.com — Microsoftmapping (report)