I have to tell you about the latest "copy-paste" disaster in cybercrime history. This is pure gold. Microsoft recently took down a massive cyber-fraud ring called "RedVDS." These guys were basically running an "all-inclusive" rental shop for cyber criminals. You just drop some crypto, and they hand you an unrestricted Windows virtual server like, "Here you go, buddy, go scam whoever you want." They used these servers to hijack corporate emails (BEC) and run massive phishing campaigns. We’re talking about $40 million stolen in the U.S. alone! But here’s the kicker: How did this massive network get busted? (Pay attention here). The guy who built the system set up an automated virtualization infrastructure (QEMU) to spin up thousands of servers instantly. Everything looked super professional up to that point. But then, peak laziness kicked in. Think of it like this: you build a high tech printing press to make thousands of fake passports, but you...
Phishing attempts are getting sneakier, often leveraging homoglyph attacks or unusual characters to trick employees. I put together a simple but effective query to scan for new users created with "weird" characters in the email domain that indicates a potential sign of a spoofed or malicious account creation attempt. KQL Breakdown: This query scans 7 days of CloudAppEvents for the `Create user.` action, then checks the new user's email domain for any non-ASCII characters (characters outside the standard English keyboard set: $\text{U+0000}$ to $\text{U+007F}$) . This is a great starting point for spotting internationalized domain name (IDN) abuse or other sophisticated L3 attacks. CloudAppEvents | where TimeGenerated > ago(7d) | where ActionType == "Create user." | extend Email = tostring(parse_json(RawEventData).EmailAddress) | extend Domain = tostring(split(Email,"@")[1]) | where Domain matches regex @"[^\u0000-\u007F]" | project Ti...