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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Federal prosecutors have charged a Russian national with conspiracy to commit unauthorized computer access in connection with a sprawling cyber-espionage campaign linked to the Russia-aligned threat group Void Blizzard, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court this week.

Denis Nikolayevich Obrezko, a Russian citizen, is accused of breaking into systems owned by companies in the United States and elsewhere, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed Tuesday. Investigators allege Obrezko facilitated the campaign by purchasing a virtual private server and domain names used in attacks targeting businesses, educational institutions, and other organizations.

The charges come roughly a year after Microsoft publicly identified Void Blizzard — which it also tracks as Laundry Bear — as a state-sponsored Russian threat group conducting large-scale espionage operations against government agencies, defense suppliers, and critical infrastructure providers across NATO member states, Ukraine, and beyond. Dutch intelligence and security services separately confirmed in May 2025 that the group had infiltrated the Netherlands’ national police force in September 2024, stealing work-related contact information on police staff.

The FBI affidavit describes a methodical but largely unsophisticated operation. Investigators say Void Blizzard primarily relied on stolen session tokens to authenticate to victim accounts without triggering re-authentication requirements, then used a U.S.-based commercial proxy service to mask the connection’s location. The group typically routed traffic through a VPN before selecting proxy IP addresses in the same region as a target, allowing it to bypass geographic firewall restrictions.

From June-July 2024, the FBI received tips from a foreign partner and a U.S.-based private-sector firm identifying several American companies being targeted by the emerging group. Investigators subsequently verified intrusions at 11 U.S. companies, a figure the affidavit describes as likely a fraction of the total victim count nationwide.

Void Blizzard’s methods, while not technically advanced, have proven broadly effective. Microsoft researchers noted in 2025 that the group’s success illustrates the sustained risk posed by even basic intrusion techniques when applied at scale. The group has been observed harvesting bulk email and files from compromised cloud environments, accessing Microsoft Teams conversations, and cataloging Microsoft Entra ID configurations to map organizational structures.

In April 2025, Microsoft identified a separate spear-phishing campaign attributed to Void Blizzard that targeted more than 20 non-governmental organizations in Europe and the United States, using typosquatted domains to spoof Microsoft authentication pages. The affidavit corroborates that activity, identifying domains such as miscrsosoft[.]com and micsrosoftonline[.]com registered through accounts connected to the same infrastructure used by the group.

Obrezko appeared in court Tuesday and agreed to be taken into custody while awaiting trial.

You can read the affidavit below.

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