Suspicious Spoofed Inbound Email With Failed Authentication and Anonymous Internal Sender (via m365)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
m365
Service
exchange
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-07-02
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Execution

  4. Persistence

  5. Priv Esc

  6. Defense Evasion

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects inbound messages that fail SPF, DKIM, and composite authentication yet are marked as internal organization senders while authenticating anonymously. This combination reflects the routing and misconfiguration abuse used by phishing actors to spoof trusted internal domains and bypass tenant protections. Detecting the mismatch between claimed internal origin and failed authentication surfaces domain-spoofing phishing that would otherwise appear trustworthy to recipients.

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Suspicious Spoofed Inbound Email With Failed Authentication and Anonymous Internal Sender (via m365)
Pivot detection · T1566.002 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.