A Russian state-sponsored threat group has been stealing sensitive data from governments and commercial organizations since July 2025 via a novel exploit in popular Linux-based enterprise software, U.S. authorities and cyber officials from more than a dozen other countries warned in a joint cybersecurity advisory Thursday.

Laundry Bear’s most recent espionage campaign involves the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that wasn’t patched until November 2025, five months after attacks were well underway, officials said. 

The exploit just requires a view — no clicks — and allows attackers to steal the previous 90 days’ worth of email, the account’s password, search history, the victim organization’s email directory, two-factor authentication tokens and other newly created passwords.

“The covert and persistent nature of this activity, along with the absence of any known financial extortion, almost certainly indicates this group’s involvement in espionage activities with Russian government backing,” officials wrote in the advisory. 

“Additionally, extensive Ukrainian targeting, prior to use against U.S. and other NATO allies, outlines an increasing trend within Russian cyber threat groups to target Ukrainian users first—both as a priority target and as a testbench for malicious cyber techniques before broader global deployment.”

The state-sponsored espionage group, also known as Void Blizzard, has compromised governments and organizations in the defense, education, energy, law enforcement, media, finance, transportation and technology sectors. 

Laundry Bear’s year-long campaign involving the exploitation of CVE-2025-66376 showcases more technical capabilities, including a custom JavaScript payload it delivers to targeted victims via phishing emails. The threat group could also likely adapt the novel data exfiltration and aggregation capability, dubbed “beehive,” to exploit other vulnerabilities, officials warned.

The defect’s medium-severity rating of 6.1 underscores the challenge defenders regularly confront in prioritizing patching schedules based on measure of severity alone.

The Russian state-supported group, which has been active since at least 2024, is still actively exploiting Zimbra Collaboration Suite instances that remain unpatched, officials said.

Authorities shared Thursday indicators of compromise, mitigation steps and urged organizations to update their vulnerable software.

“This campaign’s targeted victimology and limited exploitation capabilities likely indicate this group manually identifies and targets the victim organizations” by identifying organizations with public-facing infrastructure, officials wrote in the advisory.

Once a target is identified, Laundry Bear also likely compiles email addresses for users to target with the exploit via phishing emails. Officials did not identify specific victims or describe the volume of organizations already compromised.

The joint cybersecurity advisory was issued by the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

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Russian state-sponsored hackers are breaking into critical infrastructure around the world by exploiting poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices, authorities from the United States and 12 additional countries said in a joint cybersecurity advisory Monday.

Officials once again urged defenders to take more preventative measures to thwart attacks from the Russian Federal Security Service Center 16, which has been actively targeting critical infrastructure for more than a decade. The hackers are also tracked as Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard and Static Tundra.

“This is an ongoing issue that has impacted various U.S. and foreign networks across multiple sectors, including the defense industrial base, communications, energy, financial services, government facilities and health care sectors,” the National Security Agency said in a statement.

The state-sponsored attackers scan the internet for vulnerable routers using default or weak passwords, and have also exploited vulnerabilities in Cisco devices, Cisco’s Smart Install feature and web portals to take over network devices. 

Two of the Cisco vulnerabilities exploited by the Russian FSB Center 16 hackers are quite old, including CVE-2008-4128 and CVE-2018-0171. 

Officials shared technical details of the threat group’s activities and advised network defenders to disable Cisco Smart Install on all devices, use stronger modes of authentication and passwords, monitor for unusual credentials and logins using local accounts. 

The joint advisory comes nearly a year after the FBI issued a similar alert about the same group targeting end-of-life networking devices running Cisco Smart Install. 

On Monday, the European Union blamed Russia’s FSB Center 16 for a December 2025 attack on Poland’s energy grid. The United Kingdom, also on Monday, sanctioned 24 individuals and entities allegedly involved in various attacks attributed to Russian intelligence services.

“From directing criminals to targeting businesses, and striking Poland’s energy grid in the depths of winter, the Russian state is sinking to new lows in its attempts to undermine European security,” Yvette Cooper, foreign security of the United Kingdom, said in a statement. 

Other countries behind the joint cybersecurity advisory include: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Poland and Sweden.

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The Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit that has convened world leaders on global security issues, is launching a new project to bring together international experts to assess AI-related threats to global internet infrastructure.

The Integrated Network for Trusted AI in Cyberspace (INTAiC) will tap researchers and civil society experts from government and the private sector, analyzing current AI cyber threats from the field and creating “forward-looking” reports on how the technology will impact society and what organizations can do to respond.

One of the project’s top goals is to create an international, quick-response coalition of government and business to address AI-related threats, similar to coordination mechanisms that exist in other areas of cybersecurity.

“Evidence fragmentation on AI-driven cyber threats isn’t incidental — it’s structural: those defending networks and those securing AI systems have long worked in separate spheres,” said Adrien Abecassis, policy initiatives director for the Paris Peace Forum. “That’s exactly why INTAiC is unique — it’s built to turn those fragments into one comparable reading of the threat, because this is a challenge no actor can meet alone.”

The network already lists a number of prominent businesses and organizations, including Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, the Cloud Security Alliance, Orange Cyberdefense and others.

According to the forum, INTAiC’s work will focus primarily on two, separate workstreams. One is a single and regularly updated resource for defenders to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping cyber threats. The resource is focused more on attacker capabilities, different forms of misuse and the impact on security operations rather than isolated incidents.

“The result is a common reference point, grounded in reality, that gives policymakers a clearer measure of the threat and identifies the risks most deserving of collective attention,” the Forum said in a release.

The second workstream will focus on evaluating and preventing cyber risks associated with AI, building up a base of independent third-party experts who can provide neutral or unbiased assessments of frontier model cyber capabilities. That work will pull in governments, research institutions and non-profits to develop new organizational and funding pathways to support that kind of research.

While the U.S. federal government has come a long way in recent years building up its own capacity to test and study AI cyber threats, much of the access and technical expertise around frontier model capabilities are concentrated within commercial AI companies. This has at times created concerns that federal agencies were being overly reliant on AI companies to explain how the technology worked and walk them through the possible threat scenarios.

As Anthropic and OpenAI have rolled out defensive cybersecurity programs like Project Glasswing and the Trusted Access for Cyber program, access to those models have become available to a wider group of researchers and organizations.

The Paris Peace Forum intends to brief the public further on INTAiC’s work and accomplishments in Paris later this year during the organization’s annual conference in November.

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The U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security seized multiple internet domains this week, accusing them of being used to publishing thousands of AI or digitally-altered images and videos of nude women.

The domains, CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com, specialized in digital forgeries that “were made to appear to be sexual images of famous women, including politicians, first ladies of multiple countries, royalty, journalists, television presenters, athletes, entertainers, and others” either nude or engaged in sexual activity,” according to a Department of Justice release.

In addition to creating sexual images and videos of women without their consent, the service allowed people to browse by topics, including “rape,” “forced,” and “degradation.”

That description comes from a Department of Justice release describing the contents of its probable cause affidavit and search warrants. CyberScoop has not viewed the court documents.  

The sites were seized under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law passed last year giving federal authorities the ability to criminally prosecute those who create and distribute deepfake porn. The law was a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in Washington D.C., gaining support from both Democrats and Republicans who said their constituents were demanding tougher laws to curb the use of AI to create nonconsensual deepfake porn.

The operation marks one of the largest seizures since the law went into effect. The details of the operation disclosed by the government show how creators of deepfake porn rely on a web of international assets and infrastructure to evade law enforcement.

Robert Fraiser, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, said U.S. authorities worked in coordination with law enforcement agencies in France and Italy. According to U.S. officials, they were first notified about the website by Italian Polizia de Stato, while a parallel investigation run by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office in France resulted in the arrest of a suspect connected with the site, along with seized cryptocurrency funds.

“These seizures stopped a website that trafficked in humiliation, exploitation, and the violation of personal privacy on a massive scale,” said Frazer in a statement. “For the victims whose images were distributed without their consent, the harm is not virtual — it is deeply personal and often enduring.”

According to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, Cyrille B., a 47-year-old French national was arrested and accused of being an administrator for CFAKE. A search of his home in Nice found computer equipment related to the site and a little more than $48,000 in Ethereum cryptocurrency that they said came from the site’s advertising.

The French investigation identified 300,000 images, 7,000 videos depicting 14,000 individuals from different countries. The site had approximately 200,000 user accounts, 4 million views per month and uploaded 50 pieces of new content every day.

The suspect had no prior criminal record, and will go to trial on July 7. The charges carry potential penalties of up to seven years in prison and €500,000.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigation division is leading the federal investigation, in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s office for New Jersey.

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European authorities took down a prominent virtual private network service and arrested the alleged administrator behind an operation that cybercriminals used to steal data, commit fraud and ransomware attacks, Europol said Thursday. 

First VPN, which was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, gained popularity for providing services that allowed users to hide their infrastructure and identities. Officials said the service was entrenched in the cybercrime world and appeared in almost every major recent cybercrime investigation aided by Europol.

“For years, cybercriminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity,” Edvardas Šileris, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, said in a statement. 

“They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement,” Šileris added. “This operation proves them wrong. Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate and evade law enforcement.”

The operation stretched over two days earlier this week, led by France and the Netherlands, with support from Europol, Eurojust and eight additional countries. 

Authorities said they arrested the alleged administrator and searched their residence in Ukraine, but declined to name the person. Officials also dismantled 33 servers linked to the service and seized multiple domains, including 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net and 1vpns.org.

Investigators obtained First VPN’s user database and identified VPN connections used by alleged cybercriminals. Intelligence gathered during the operation uncovered thousands of users linked to cybercrime and formed additional leads connected to ransomware attacks and fraud schemes, officials said. 

Europol said First VPN’s users were notified of the shutdown and warned that their identities are now known to authorities. 

French and Dutch authorities started investigating First VPN in earnest in November 2023 and shared evidence with 16 countries to coordinate data analysis and support other ongoing investigations. Officials across multiple jurisdictions are using intelligence gathered during the operation to aid 21 additional inquiries globally.

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