The DragonForce ransomware gang just gave us another huge reason to hate Microsoft Teams

Of all the nightmarish aspects of modern technology, Microsoft Teams is among the very worst.

Now this loathed communication app has become even more loathsome courtesy of a ransomware gang researchers noted for its "exceptionally sophisticated tradecraft".

Anyone with the misfortune to work for a company that relies on Teams - which includes roughly 90% of companies in the Fortune 500 - has the doom-tolling alerts of an incoming call burned into their brain.

They may also have learned to detest "bossware" features such as activity trackers and other workplace horrors built into Teams.

But this infamous app is so central to the functioning of many modern businesses that it's no exaggeration to say that a major outage would constitute a systemic risk to the global economy.

Now it has emerged that the group behind the DragonForce ransomware operation used Teams infrastructure to disguise malicious communications during an attack on a major US services company.

The hackers reportedly deployed a custom tool called Backdoor.Turn, which is the first malware to piggyback on Teams’ relay network to make its command-and-control traffic look like ordinary Microsoft traffic.

DragonForce also exploited a vulnerable Huawei audio driver using a technique known as “Havoc Process Terminator”, allowing the attackers to gain kernel-level privileges and forcibly terminate security processes.

In a blog announcing the findings, researchers from Symantec and Black Carbon wrote: "The attackers in this campaign use exceptionally sophisticated cyber tradecraft. The configuration of Backdoor.Turn means that security products only see C&C traffic going to legitimate Teams servers, leaving defenders unaware that data is being siphoned away by malicious actors.

"DragonForce, which has been active since at least June 2023 and is developed by a group Symantec tracks as Hackledorb, has transitioned from a standard ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model to a highly organized, formalized cartel structure.

"This move suggests elevated organizational maturity, significant resource allocation, and a strategic focus on high-impact, targeted campaigns."

Trust no-one, verify everything

The broader significance is hard to miss. Increasingly, the same trusted systems that keep organizations running are also providing cover for the people trying to break into them.

And the more society concentrates data, workflows, and communications, inside a handful of giant platforms, the more valuable those platforms become as camouflage - and the greater risk a compromise poses.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO of CyberSmart, said: "This campaign shows how attackers are exploiting trust in major technology brands to turn routine security alerts into a route for compromise. The important lesson is that even a message claiming to warn users about account compromise can itself be the threat."

In a world where every packet appears to come from Microsoft, distinguishing legitimate activity from malicious activity becomes less a technical challenge than an epistemological one. The signal and the noise are beginning to wear the same uniform.

READ MORE: "AI didn’t invent new classes of risk. It poured fuel onto existing ones."

Dray Agha, Senior Manager, Security Operations Center - EMEA at Huntress. said: “Hijacking Microsoft Teams for command and control is no doubt a sophisticated evasion technique, but it’s part of a wider trend Huntress is observing; threat actors are rarely bringing offensive security C2 tools on machines, instead they’re weaponizing legitimate remote access tools that IT administrators would also use.

"It would be a mistake to implicitly trust network traffic just because it belongs to a familiar application, like Teams. Organizations must transition toward deep behavioral analytics and a strict Zero Trust architecture to catch the subtle anomalies these 'living off the land' techniques leave behind.” 

The incident highlights the increasing skill of the gang behind DragonForce, which Deborah Galea, Cybersecurity Specialist at Filigran, described as a move beyond a "standard Ransomware-as-a-Service operation into a cartel orchestrator, attempting to consolidate the ransomware ecosystem under its umbrella.

She said: "The group is essentially becoming a criminal platform provider, a bit like the 'AWS of ransomware' if you will. This makes it a fundamentally different kind of threat: not just a direct attacker, but a coordination and infrastructure layer that makes the entire ransomware ecosystem more resilient, more capable, and harder to disrupt."

The tyranny of Teams

In this instance, threat actors have not found a vulnerability impacting every Microsoft Teams deployment.

But the incident does show the perils of concentration. Frankly, it is ludicrous that so many of the world's most important companies depend on the same communications platform.

Yes, there is an argument to be made that organizations of vulnerable no matter what chat app they use. The social engineering used by groups like Scattered Spider show us that the old ways of traditional scamming always remain effective as long as there is a human to target.

However, monocultures create their own risks. When a single platform becomes the default communications layer for large parts of the global economy, attackers can refine their techniques against one environment and reap rewards across thousands of organizations.

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The lesson is not that Microsoft Teams is uniquely insecure.

It is that excessive dependence on any single platform creates systemic risk.

Diversity has long been understood as a strength in nature, and the same principle applies to technology.

Unfortunately, we're only likely to realize the perils of concentration when it's too late, and we all realize just how much our productivity (and perhaps even our civilization) depends on a hated communications app.

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