Microsoft on Tuesday said it disrupted a malware-signing-as-a-service (MSaaS) operation that weaponized the company's Artifact Signing system to deliver malicious code and conduct ransomware and other attacks, compromising thousands of machines and networks across the world. The tech giant attributed the activity to a threat actor it calls Fox Tempest, which it said offered the MSaaS scheme to allow cybercriminals to disguise malware as legitimate software. The threat actor has been active since May 2025. The seizure effort has been codenamed OpFauxSign. "To disrupt the service, we seized Fox Tempest's website signspace[.]cloud, took offline hundreds of the virtual machines running the operation, and blocked access to a site hosting the underlying code," Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said. Microsoft noted that the operation enabled the deployment of Rhysida ransomware by threat actors such as Vanilla Tempest, along with other malware families like Oyster, Lumma Stealer, and Vidar, illustrating the crucial role played by Fox Tempest within the cybercrime ecosystem. In addition, connections have been uncovered between the threat actor and affiliates associated with several prominent ransomware strains, including INC, Qilin, BlackByte, and Akira. Attacks mounted by these operations have targeted healthcare, education, government, and financial services located across the U.S., France, India, and China. Artifact Signing (formerly Azure Trusted Signing) is Microsoft's fully managed, end-to-end signing solution that allows developers to easily build and distribute applications, while ensuring that the software is legitimate and hasn't been modified by unauthorized parties. Fox Tempest is said to have leveraged this mechanism to generate short-lived, fraudulent code-signing certificates and use them to deliver trusted, signed malware and slip past security controls. The certificates were valid for only 72 hours. "To obt