The NATO CCDCOE exercise in Estonia introduces AI agents and OpenAI Daybreak into joint cyber and kinetic operations training.

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Russian government-connected hackers compromised two defense firms and a law enforcement agency in North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries as part of an espionage campaign, Symantec researchers said in a blog post Tuesday.

The infamous group behind hacks of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election cycle was behind the attacks that Symantec identified in recent months: Swallowtail, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard, notorious for its links to the Russian military agency GRU.

The hackers apparently chose the targets of their attacks carefully, including a naval shipbuilder, a manufacturer of military aircraft engines and the law enforcement agency. In the attack on the shipbuilder, Symantec saw “hands-on-keyboard” activity as the hackers repeatedly returned to a compromised host over the course of a week to steal credentialed material.

“Hands-on-keyboard activity means a human operator is choosing what to do next, rather than malware running a fixed routine,” Dick O’Brien, principal intelligence analyst at the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, told CyberScoop. “It’s essentially confirmation that the organization is a genuine target for the operators, not an accidental infection. It also confirms that further exploitation beyond the initial infection was at least attempted.”

O’Brien said the campaign reflected broader intelligence collection aimed at European government and defense targets, but its motive wasn’t certain. He speculated that it could have been part of campaigns to target nations aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The hackers made use of the Hookedge backdoor first identified in August by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. That firm saw attacks dating back to September of last year by the same group using the same backdoor on defense and diplomatic targets in Romania, Spain and Turkey.

Symantec also observed the hackers deploying a previously undocumented loader.

“What surprised us was that the attackers then moved their most sensitive follow-up activity onto a dedicated server, when Recorded Future had expected them to keep hopping between free services,” O’Brien said. “The loader, ld.exe, hadn’t been publicly documented. It decrypts its payload in memory, and it needs a key supplied only at runtime on the command line. Without both the encrypted file and the key, the payload can’t be recovered. We didn’t recover it, so we don’t know its function.”

This spring, researchers and U.S. government agencies said they quashed a Forest Blizzard espionage campaign. Western governments warned last year about the group targeting companies supporting Ukraine.

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That online ad you saw for earbuds, a drone or bubble gum-scented car air freshener may have been a gateway for mercenary spyware that can infect your device without you ever having to click on it.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto on Thursday said it was revealing the first details of zero-click spyware being delivered through targeted advertising, which it’s calling AdFection. It concluded that while the Israeli company Discover-Tech presents itself as a legitimate advertising firm, in actuality it operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners, including the well-known Candiru. Its ads covertly direct millions of devices to contact Candiru’s servers.

The likely goal, according to the researchers, is large-scale tracking and surveillance, enabled by accident by major industry players like Google. The campaign led to the infection of devices at media outlet Al Jazeera, they said, but Discover-Tech’s ads have also appeared on many sensitive networks around the world, including at the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency and world cybersecurity agencies, according to partner investigators at ad security firm Confiant.

It’s a discovery that the researchers said raises uncomfortable questions for regulators, whom The Citizen Lab said need to investigate Discover-Tech and levy sanctions, and for the online advertising industry.

“The adtech industry, the digital advertising industry, has a lot of rethinking to do to reconsider how they approach these threats of surveillance and the responsibilities that they have with the data that they collect and how it might be abused,” said Jerome Dangu, chief technology officer and co-founder of Confiant. “The industry has optimized against cyber criminals, scams and malware for profit that targets people for extracting money, but not for surveillance.”

Wolfie Cristl, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, said it was “disastrous” that ad vendors didn’t detect the operation for years. Discover-Tech was registered in 2020 and has facilitated mercenary spyware since at least 2024. The activities of a shadowy outfit that the researchers dubbed DARK CARTOGRAPHER, which involves Discover-Tech and other vendors — including an unnamed U.S. intelligence contractor — date back to 2019.

“Digital advertising is broken. The way the online advertising ecosystem works today is a security threat for states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike,” Cristl said. “Cybersecurity agencies, regulators and lawmakers in the U.S., Europe and other regions must urgently step in. They must investigate the involved companies and fix the systemic risks that enable malicious ad targeting.”

Earlier reports have touched on the existence of mercenary spyware that can infect users through online ads, but Thursday’s research marks the first technical demonstration of infections and distribution through targeted advertising.

The Citizen Lab can’t currently attribute the AdFection attacks to any specific party.

Discover-Tech has appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors maintained by Google and IAB Europe, an advertising industry association. In response to the research, Google has removed Discover-Tech from its vendor registries and ended its access to Google ad platforms, while IAB Europe has removed Discover-Tech from its global vendor list.

Between March and June of this year, the researchers found Discover-Tech ads displayed in over 120,000 websites and over 70,000 mobile apps.

The Citizen Lab said that at least 45 devices at Al Jazeera were targeted in zero-click attacks that it linked with high confidence to Candiru spyware delivered by Discover-Tech’s ads.

Candiru spyware has shown the ability to take over a device remotely, steal data from it, access its microphone and camera, and more. Researchers discovered that in addition to Candiru, Discover-Tech has connections to another mercenary hacking firm, Bindecy, and a mercenary ad intelligence firm, Intelos.

Furthermore, the report states, “Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that enables its mercenary surveillance partners to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered.”

The DARK CARTOGRAPHER role is more mysterious.

“A separate threat actor we call DARK CARTOGRAPHER is using Discover-Tech’s infrastructure to exploit vulnerabilities across numerous mobile carriers to link device advertising IDs with phone numbers, mass-deanonymizing internet users. We will detail our findings concerning this threat actor in a separate forthcoming report,” Thursday’s report states. “Notably, DARK CARTOGRAPHER infrastructure links to both a mercenary adtech vendor and a U.S. government contractor. It is rare to see such direct overlaps between mercenary vendors and U.S. government or intelligence contractors.”

Discover-Tech, Candiru, Bindecy and Intelos did not respond to The Citizen Lab’s letters seeking comment.

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NATO’s cyber defense arm and a startup that uses artificial intelligence to find software flaws can now issue the ID numbers the industry uses to track those flaws, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity announced last week. 

The NATO Cyber Security Centre, part of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, and AISLE, a cybersecurity company with offices in San Francisco and Prague, joined as CVE numbering authorities under the ENISA Root. The CVE program assigns a unique record to each publicly disclosed security flaw so that governments, vendors and researchers have a common marker when referring to particular vulnerabilities. 

Twenty numbering authorities now sit under the ENISA Root, with 12 brought in by ENISA itself and eight moving over from the MITRE Root, run by the U.S. nonprofit that has handled the program’s daily work for more than 20 years.

Hans de Vries, ENISA’s chief cybersecurity and operations officer, linked the growth to changes in how people find flaws. 

“Recent developments in the global cybersecurity landscape, coupled with the emergence of Frontier AI models and their impact on vulnerability discovery and exploitation, have underscored the need to build strong vulnerability management infrastructure and capabilities,” he said in a statement. He said ENISA’s role helps build a “more globally representative, resilient, and scalable vulnerability identification ecosystem.”

The two new members show how bespoke each member is within its authority. The NATO Cyber Security Centre can now assign CVE IDs to eligible flaws across the NATO enterprise. The agency said that will make tracking more consistent and let the alliance share information with trusted partners sooner. The center guards NATO’s networks, watches for threats and coordinates the response when incidents hit.

Meanwhile, AISLE’s authorization is narrower. The company said in a July press release that the designation covers vulnerabilities discovered in its own products, allowing it to publish identifiers without waiting for a third-party authority to process a request. 

Jaya Baloo, the company’s co-founder, described the step as “foundational” and said coordinated disclosure “starts with holding your own products to the same standard you expect of everyone else.” Separately from the designation, the company said its researchers have disclosed hundreds of vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software, including OpenSSL, Linux, Apache and OpenEMR, each coordinated through the relevant authority for that project.

The changes come as the CVE process continues to involve amid program upheaval and the torrent of vulnerabilities discovered by AI systems. 

The CVE program, run by CISA, narrowly escaped a sudden demise when a last-minute, 11-month contract extension averted a shutdown in April 2025. Since then, several competing databases from European nonprofits and other private entities have been stood up in order to better coordinate how vulnerabilities are tracked, disclosed, and ultimately patched.

Earlier this year, The Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg (CIRCL) launched the Global CVE Allocation System, or GCVE, as an alternative to the CVE program.

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