Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees’ paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services.
Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to victims’ HR portals by sending them phishing emails that trick the recipients into providing their credentials for logging in to the cloud account. The scammers are able to recover multi-factor authentication codes by using adversary-in-the-middle tactics, which work by sitting between the victims and the site they think they’re logging in to, which is, in fact, a fake site operated by the attackers.
Not all MFA is created equal
The attackers then enter the intercepted credentials, including the MFA code, into the real site. This tactic, which has grown increasingly common in recent years, underscores the importance of adopting FIDO-compliant forms of MFA, which are immune to such attacks.
Once inside the employees’ accounts, the scammers make changes to payroll configurations within Workday. The changes cause direct-deposit payments to be diverted from accounts originally chosen by the employee and instead flow to an account controlled by the attackers. To block messages Workday automatically sends to users when such account details have been changed, the attackers create email rules that keep the messages from appearing in the inbox.
“The threat actor used realistic phishing emails, targeting accounts at multiple universities, to harvest credentials,” Microsoft said in a Thursday post. “Since March 2025, we’ve observed 11 successfully compromised accounts at three universities that were used to send phishing emails to nearly 6,000 email accounts across 25 universities.”
