Mandiant recently said that it found an increase in threat activity that deploys tradecraft for extortion attacks carried out by a financially gained group ShinyHunters.
- These attacks use advanced voice phishing (vishing) and fake credential harvesting sites imitating targeted organizations to get illicit access to victims systems by collecting sign-on (SSO) credentials and two factor authentication codes.
- The attacks aim to target cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps to steal sensitive data and internal communications and blackmail victims.
Google owned Mandiant’s threat intelligence team is tracking the attacks under various clusters: UNC6661, UNC6671, and UNC6240 (aka ShinyHunters). These gangs might be improving their attack tactics. "While this methodology of targeting identity providers and SaaS platforms is consistent with our prior observations of threat activity preceding ShinyHunters-branded extortion, the breadth of targeted cloud platforms continues to expand as these threat actors seek more sensitive data for extortion," Mandiant said.
"Further, they appear to be escalating their extortion tactics with recent incidents, including harassment of victim personnel, among other tactics.”
Theft details
UNC6661 was pretending to be IT staff sending employees to credential harvesting links tricking them into multi-factor authentication (MFA) settings. This was found during mid-January 2026.
Threat actors used stolen credentials to register their own device for MFA and further steal data from SaaS platforms. In one incident, the hacker exploited their access to infected email accounts to send more phishing emails to users in cryptocurrency based organizations.
The emails were later deleted to hide the tracks. Experts also found UNC6671 mimicking IT staff to fool victims to steal credentials and MFA login codes on credential harvesting websites since the start of this year. In a few incidents, the hackers got access to Okta accounts.
UNC6671 leveraged PowerShell to steal sensitive data from OneDrive and SharePoint.
Attack tactic
The use of different domain registrars to register the credential harvesting domains (NICENIC for UNC6661 and Tucows for UNC6671) and the fact that an extortion email sent after UNC6671 activity did not overlap with known UNC6240 indicators are the two main differences between UNC6661 and UNC6671.
This suggests that other groups of people might be participating, highlighting how nebulous these cybercrime organizations are. Furthermore, the targeting of bitcoin companies raises the possibility that the threat actors are searching for other opportunities to make money.
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.webp "New Report Reveals Hackers Now Aim for Money, Not Chaos")