Psychiatrische Dienste Aargau (PDAG) email accounts compromised via phishing and abused to relay spam

Psychiatrische Dienste Aargau AG (PDAG), a Swiss cantonal psychiatric-care provider, disclosed that unauthorised parties gained access to individual @pdag.ch email accounts and abused them to send spam and phishing messages to external recipients (SwissCybersecurity.net, 2026-07-09; Inside IT, 2026-07-08). On discovery, PDAG locked the affected accounts immediately, reset passwords for all employees as a precaution, notified the competent cantonal and national authorities, and engaged internal and external IT-security experts plus its external ICT service provider to analyse and harden. By its current assessment the incident is limited to account misuse for outbound spam/phishing, with no indication that patient data was accessed or exfiltrated; the organisation is warning recipients about suspicious mail purporting to come from its domain.

No technical root cause — the initial-access vector into the mailboxes, whether MFA was enforced, or whether the takeover was via credential phishing or an OAuth consent grant — was disclosed, so the mechanism is unknown rather than assumed. The pattern maps to T1566 Phishing for the initial access and T1586.002 Compromise Accounts: Email Accounts for the takeover and downstream abuse.