A cybersecurity working group at the G7 is urging governments to accelerate defenses against quantum computers that could break some existing forms of public key encryption.

The working group’s report, prepared in June at the G7 Summit in France, said organizations “can no longer afford to postpone” work transitioning critical systems and data to “post-quantum” forms of encryption.

“The quantum threat remains off the radar for many organizations and not properly resourced, with other security concerns taking precedence,” the working group report said. “Yet, a successful and collective transition to PQC can only be achieved if organizations understand that the quantum threat is an economic and business risk, and not merely a cryptographic risk.”

Instead, leaders in government and industry “must reframe the quantum threat from a distant future problem to a near-term threat that demands action across all sectors, not just critical infrastructure.”

The report acknowledged uncertain timelines for quantum computers, but identified that threats like harvesting current sensitive, encrypted data to decrypt it in the future do exist today.

The report also warned that quantum computers could compromise authentication and assurance mechanisms—by forging trusted data or stealing confirmation— jeopardizing secure communications and legal contracts.

The working group’s conclusions are largely in line with what governments have been recommending for years, urging industry to inventory and prioritize their critical systems and shift over to newer, “post-quantum cryptography” encryption algorithms.

These encryption algorithms, originally designed by independent cryptographers and vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology and National Security Agency, will be used to protect the government’s own systems and data from cybercriminals and foreign governments.

The Trump administration recently issued an executive order directing agencies to boost the domestic quantum industry and move up internal timelines for migrating to PQC encryption from 2035 to 2030. Google, a potential industry bellwether, and other companies have opted to move their own migration timelines to 2029.

But while that work has proceeded on schedule in some areas, like the federal government and the highly regulated financial sector, it has lagged in other industries where owners and operators feel they have more immediate concerns than quantum computers.

“We acknowledge that transitioning to PQC is not a problem for individual organizations to solve in isolation, but rather a collective transition that can only be achieved with early engagement, coordinated planning and informed decision making across the public and private sectors,” the working group wrote.

While often referred to as “Post-Quantum” encryption, the reality is more complex. Cryptographers believe the algorithms selected by NIST and NSA will stand up to attacks from a quantum computer, but since one doesn’t exist today, designing cryptographic protections against it requires some guesswork and mathematical estimation.

Estimates can be wrong, or overlook the entire cryptographic attack surface. Some NIST-selected algorithms have already been broken with traditional computers or AI. That’s why the agency backs multiple algorithms and concepts like “crypto-agility,” allowing organizations to quickly switch between them.

The G7 report was signed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), The French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security (BSI), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Japan’s National Cybersecurity Office (NCO) and Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN).

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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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