Beyond the ransomware: Tracking Storm-2570’s consistent tradecraft across deployments

Summary

Storm-2570, a ransomware affiliate tracked since April 2025, demonstrates consistent post-compromise tradecraft across multiple ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) ecosystems, including Qilin, DragonForce, Anubis, and BERT. This affiliate operates across various industries and geographies, shifting between ransomware operations to maximize payouts. Microsoft highlights the importance of tracking actor behavior rather than just payloads to detect and disrupt these recurring intrusions.

Full text

Share Link copied to clipboard! TagsRansomwareRansomware as a serviceStormThreats intelligenceRansomwareThreat actorsContent typesResearchProducts and servicesMicrosoft DefenderMicrosoft Defender for EndpointTopicsThreat intelligence Activity associated with Storm-2570, a ransomware affiliate linked to multiple ransomware payloads, illustrates how tracking and responding to ransomware attacks by payload alone can obscure the affiliates carrying out intrusions and the recurring behaviors that defenders can use to detect and disrupt them. Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-2570 using consistent post-compromise tools and techniques across deployments involving Qilin, DragonForce, Anubis, and BERT ransomware. Across multiple investigations, Storm-2570 has maintained largely uniform tradecraft, infrastructure overlaps, and repeated use of the same remote access and cloud exfiltration tooling despite operating across multiple ransomware ecosystems. These findings reinforce the value of examining threat actor behavior across the attack chain rather than treating each ransomware payload as an isolated activity set. Recurring remote access, credential access, lateral movement, security tampering, and data exfiltration activity can help defenders connect related intrusions and respond before ransomware deployment, even when the final payload changes. In this blog post, we delve into the attack techniques attributed to Storm-2570. While Storm-2570’s methodology aligns with the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of many tracked ransomware actors, analysis of their post-compromise tactics provides essential insights into how organizations can harden and defend against ransomware threat actors, informing opportunities to disrupt attackers even if they have gained initial access to a network. At the end of this blog, we also provide a comprehensive recommendation section with detection details. Who is Storm-2570? Storm-2570 is a ransomware affiliate that Microsoft Threat Intelligence has tracked since April 2025. We assess that Storm-2570 has operated across multiple ransomware as a service (RaaS) ecosystems, including Qilin, DragonForce, Anubis, and BERT. To date, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-2570 in multiple investigated intrusions affecting organizations in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Netherlands, and Puerto Rico, including healthcare and public health, education, government agencies and services, financial services, energy, consumer retail, Information technology (IT), food and agriculture, consumer services, commercial facilities, non-government organization (NGO), chemicals, critical manufacturing, and transportation. Unlike actors that consistently support a single ransomware operation, Storm-2570 appears to be a cross-ecosystem threat actor that works with multiple ransomware groups and shifts between operations as opportunities arise, giving the threat actor the flexibility to use and deploy multiple families and improve opportunities for payouts. As a result, organizations could encounter the same actor, tools, and intrusion methods despite different ransomware payloads being deployed. Figure 1. Storm-2570’s RaaS deployment timeline Storm-2570 attack chain: From initial foothold to impact While the method through which Storm-2570 gains initial access remains unconfirmed, observed intrusion chains indicate subsequent use of remote management tooling and hands-on-keyboard activity to progress toward credential access, lateral movement, exfiltration, and ransomware deployment. Across incidents, Microsoft has observed the use of commodity tools in the pre-ransom attack stage even when the ransomware payload changed. These tools include: Remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools, including Atera, MeshAgent, ScreenConnect, Splashtop, Remotely_Agent, and NinjaRMM Discovery and lateral movement tools, including NetScan, Nmap, PsExec, Impacket, NetExec, and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) batch scripts Data collection and exfiltration tools, including s5cmd and Rclone These tools enable remote administration, command execution, persistence, and tunneling or proxy access. Figure 2. Storm-2570 attack chain Frequent use of remote management tooling across the attack chain MeshAgent, a remote device management software, stands out as one of Storm-2570’s most frequently observed remote access and execution tools across multiple intrusions. Rather than appearing as a one-off utility, MeshAgent repeatedly shows up at key points in Storm-2570 attack chains, often after the actor has gained access and is preparing to expand control, run commands, deploy additional tooling, or move toward ransomware impact. In several cases, Storm-2570 used MeshAgent along with MeshCentral as an operational bridge between initial hands-on-keyboard activity and later-stage actions, such as account manipulation, discovery, credential access, security tampering, and ransomware deployment. Many intrusions tracked by Microsoft have shown Storm-2570 tailoring MeshAgent deployments to the compromised environment. The actor renames MeshAgent-related binaries or services with victim-themed names, likely to make the tool appear more legitimate in the environment. For example, Storm-2570 renames the variant of the meshagent64 RMM tool to include the name of the compromised organization, such as meshagent64-[organization name].exe and uses Base64-encoding to obfuscate the commands being executed. In one such intrusion, MeshAgent was used alongside NinjaRMM before the activity progressed to ntdsutil for credential dumping, network scanning, and Qilin deployment. Storm-2570 uses a diverse set of remote access tools rather than relying on a single capability. The threat actor rotates among commercially available RMM platforms, remote desktop components, and tunneling utilities, often deploying multiple tools during the same intrusion. For example, Storm-2570 uses Atera to install agents and execute interactive commands, while ngrok and Cloudflared.exe expose RDP services or establish persistent outbound tunnels. Storm-2570 uses AteraAgent to issue commands and to further download and install Splashtop Streamer in compromised environments. Splashtop appears to be the interactive remote control component delivered through Atera, giving the threat actor hands-on keyboard access. The actor also uses tools such as ScreenConnect for command execution and account or domain reconnaissance and installs Remotely_Agent as a persistent remote management service. Use of tunneling utilities for persistent remote access Storm-2570 also pairs remote access tooling with tunneling utilities such as Cloudflared.exe to create resilient outbound access paths. In one intrusion, Storm-2570 installed MeshAgent and later created a persistent Cloudflare Tunnel service on the victim host. The tunnel was configured to run automatically as a service under LocalSystem, allowing the threat actor to maintain an encrypted outbound channel from inside the network. This type of tunnel can help bypass inbound firewall restrictions and provide covert remote access for follow-on activity. Discovery and credential access Post-compromise, Storm-2570 routinely conducts internal network discovery using tools such as NetScan, SoftPerfect Network Scanner Portable, and Nmap, alongside native discovery commands and file-searching activity. These activities are used to identify reachable hosts and services, map internal networks and remote systems, and locate systems, network shares, and files that may facilitate data collection, credential access, or encryption operations. For credential access and harvesting, Storm-2570 uses tools like Mimikatz, LaZagne, and pypykatz. Storm-2570 also uses ntdsutil in intrusions for NTDS.dit credential dumping, a credential theft technique against Active Directory domain credentials. The ntdsutil command usage pattern is consistent with creating an Instal

Indicators of Compromise

• malware — Qilin
• malware — DragonForce
• malware — Anubis
• malware — BERT

Entities