New extortion group 'BlackFile' running seven-figure ransom campaigns against retail and hospitality via vishing-driven SSO compromise and Salesforce/SharePoint scraping
Palo Alto's Unit 42 and the Retail & Hospitality ISAC outed a new financially-motivated group tracked as BlackFile (CL-CRI-1116, UNC6671, Cordial Spider) running data-theft extortion against retail and hospitality since February 2026 with seven-figure ransoms. The playbook: spoofed-VoIP vishing, attackers posing as IT helpdesk, victims routed to phishing pages capturing Microsoft Entra/Okta/Google SSO credentials, attackers then register their own devices to bypass MFA and pivot into Salesforce and SharePoint. Unit 42 links the group to 'The Com' and notes it has used swatting against non-paying victims. TTPs overlap heavily with ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider.
- Check
- Brief IT helpdesk staff this week on the BlackFile vishing pattern and run a tabletop on a help-desk-driven SSO compromise of one named individual.
- Affected
- Retail and hospitality are named target sectors but the playbook is industry-agnostic. Acute risk: any organization where helpdesk staff can re-enroll MFA devices over the phone without out-of-band caller verification. SaaS environments where users can perform bulk Salesforce report exports, SharePoint downloads, or Microsoft Graph queries without secondary controls.
- Fix
- Require manager confirmation on a separate channel for any MFA or password reset on high-privilege accounts. Disable phone-based helpdesk MFA reset for accounts with bulk-data access. In Okta and Entra, alert on new device registrations from unseen locations. In Salesforce, scope bulk export rights via Permission Set Groups and alert on Bulk API usage outside business hours.